The first time he worked out with his new trainer two months ago, Joshua Smith didn't even make it through the warmup before he felt gassed.

One minute of high knees left the notoriously out-of-shape former UCLA and Georgetown center hunched over at the waist and gasping for air.

"I was trying to act like I'm good, but I was like, 'Damn, this is the warmup?'" Smith said with a chuckle. "I was already exhausted and the workout hadn't even started yet."

Hiding his fatigue only became tougher for Smith as the day continued. The 383-pound former McDonald's All-American paused to catch his breath between every jump hook during a simple low-post drill. He needed almost two and a half minutes to jog a lap at a track in the Portland, Ore., area and about 11 and a half minutes to stagger through a full mile.

Smith's struggles revealed the magnitude of the challenge he and trainer Casey Trujeque faced trying to revive his stalled basketball career.

Hailed as a potential NBA prospect after high school because of his soft hands, deft passing ability and imposing size, Smith instead regressed in college and went undrafted in 2015 amid concerns about his ballooning weight and sporadic work ethic. He fell further off scouts' radars during an unproductive debut season in the NBA Development League, leaving himself just a few short months this summer to drastically improve his fitness and earn another training camp audition with an NBA team.

"I knew he was heavy, but I was taken aback after that first workout," Trujeque said. "I was like, 'Wow, we're a lot further from where we needed to be than I expected.' We had a very, very long way to go."

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Merely agreeing to train a player with Smith’s history of lethargy and indifference was a risk for a trainer of Trujeque’s growing stature.

Only a few years out of college, Trujeque had just begun to garner acclaim for his work preparing close friend and former high school teammate Allen Crabbe for his contract year with the Portland Trail Blazers. (Crabbe, a restricted free agent, signed a four-year, $75 million offer sheet Thursday with the Brooklyn Nets.) Friends warned Trujeque that the doors Crabbe's breakout season opened could quickly slam shut if he hitched his star to Smith and became the latest to fail to help the Seattle native tap into his potential.

The 6-foot-10 Smith produced a promising freshman season at UCLA and averaged 15 points per game in the 2011 NCAA tournament despite weighing anywhere from 30 to 45 pounds above his listed playing weight of 305. All he had to do to become a millionaire after the following season was to slim down to a more manageable weight, yet he showed no urgency to improve his diet or training habits and began his sophomore year noticeably bulkier.

Too heavy to log more than two or three minutes at a time without resting on defense or committing fatigue-related fouls, Smith logged only 17.2 minutes per game as a sophomore and averaged fewer points, rebounds and blocks than he did as a freshman. He apologized for letting his team down and pledged to rededicate himself the next offseason, yet nothing changed.

Smith barely got on the floor early in his junior year before transferring from UCLA after six games. He used his redshirt year at Georgetown to trim down to a more functional size, but at times during two up-and-down seasons with the Hoyas he appeared to be even heavier than the 350 pounds at which he was listed.

"When I was at UCLA and Georgetown, I was never the guy who was going to do extra workouts," Smith said. "If we had practice at 8 a.m., I was going to get there at 8 a.m. and then that was it. I wasn't going to get there earlier in the morning or go back late at night. I never put in that extra work. I always had a problem going to the gym."

Sustained progress remained elusive for Smith during his first year as a pro. He played well enough in training camp last fall that he was the Houston Rockets' final preseason cut, yet his playing time eroded as his work ethic waned and his weight swelled midway through the season with the D-League's Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the Rockets’ affiliate.

When Smith's agent, Mayar Zokaei, reached out to Trujeque just over two months ago about working with his client, the trainer first set up a face-to-face meeting to gauge the 24-year-old center's desire. Only after Smith opened up about his disappointment with the trajectory of his basketball career and his concerns about his long-term health did Trujeque decide to take a chance by working with him.

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