J. R. Smith, the New York Knicks’ backup shooting guard, is the most entertaining player in the N.B.A. with no shot at making the Hall of Fame. My favorite J. R. moment—among many worthy candidates—came late last December, during a timeout. The Knicks were losing to the Phoenix Suns by two, with twenty-four seconds left, when Mike Woodson, New York’s head coach, took out a clipboard, called for his team’s attention, and began drawing up a play. Four of his five players listened closely; the fifth, Smith, sat a chair away with a basketball in his hands. He was flipping it up and down in the air, with the same backspin he would put on a jump shot. It was as is if he were summarizing his approach to the game itself: I may not be paying attention, but give me the damn ball and I’ll be happy to shoot it. Back on the court, whether he knew the game plan or not, Smith made a game-tying shot. Nine seconds later, he received a pass while moving away from the basket, leaping and turning in one motion to fire another. Swish, at the buzzer. Who needs tactics when you’ve got talent—and bravado, and recklessness, and carelessness—like this?

On Monday, Smith became the first Knick since John Starks to win the N.B.A.’s Sixth Man Award, a designation that does not exactly ensure entry into the pantheon—quick, name last year’s winner? Any year’s winner?—but is a fitting cap to the remarkable transformation Smith has made in this, his ninth N.B.A. season, having helped the Knicks become the Eastern Conference’s best team that doesn’t have LeBron James. He is no longer the high-school phenom capable, it was thought, of being one of the best pure scorers in the game, but neither is he the head case who never found a guarded jumper he didn’t like. He’s become something in between, capable of embodying both personas in spurts, but on the whole a productive, occasionally dynamic member of a Knicks team built around Carmelo Anthony, who was, this season at least, the best scorer on the planet. Anthony remains the team’s most beloved player, but Smith is something of its mascot, and the happiest story in a happy season.

Smith serves as a stark contrast to the year’s sole unhappy narrative: the continued injury woes of Amar’e Stoudemire, the team’s once and temporary savior. It was Stoudemire’s arrival, in 2010, that attracted Anthony, which in turn attracted Tyson Chandler; the combination of that trio convinced the Knicks management that they were close enough to a championship, yet still far enough away, to take a risk on a player like Smith. Prior to his arrival in New York, Smith had been playing in China. He’d gone there during the last N.B.A. lockout, with a contract that neglected to include a clause allowing him to leave when the lockout ended. He never went to practice while in China, but that didn’t seem to affect him much: he once scored sixty points in a game. Still, Carmelo Anthony was reportedly hesitant about Smith’s signing. Anthony had a specific plan for the team he wanted, and a wild card like Smith was not in it.

Smith is one of the last remaining players from the generation that jumped straight from high school to the N.B.A.; the league commissioner David Stern has since instituted a rule preventing that. Before reaching the N.B.A., Smith’s position as the star of any team on which he played had never been challenged, and when he got to the pros he played like it, shooting below forty per cent from the field in his first two seasons, in which he started eighty-one games—more than he has in the rest of his career combined. He was, and remains, capable of remarkable feats of athleticism and deft marksmanship at one moment, and airballing a free throw in the next. This season, though, the former has finally seemed to outnumber the latter.

Off the court, Smith remains uncontrollable. He has been mocked for an absurd attempt at Twitter-based seduction, and fined, in a different incident, for tweeting a picture of a woman’s bare behind. Once, he asked his three hundred thousand Twitter followers if they wanted to ride bikes through Times Square with him in the middle of the night. Then he showed up and did it. At some point this season, perhaps with the aid of a social-media consultant, perhaps not, Smith seemed to become aware of his persona, and embrace it. After one especially boneheaded move, Smith posted a photo on Instagram of Woodson’s reaction: the kind of facial expression normally reserved for a father who has just discovered that his five-year-old decided to cut his own hair. The caption read, “That #WhatTheHellYouDoingLook.”

Unlike in years past, though, Smith’s eccentricities have been tolerated, thanks to his on-court performance. What is next remains unclear. Amar’e Stoudemire, whose salary is nearly ten times larger than Smith’s, is locked in for two more seasons, whereas Smith is a free agent. But it is Smith whom Knicks fans would most miss were he not on the roster next year. For now, they’ll settle for him coming off the bench against the Celtics in Game Two of their first-round playoff series Tuesday night, when they’ll cringe and cheer in equal measure each time he lifts up for an off-balance shot. He’s always earned the cringes; now he deserves the cheers.

Photograph, of J. R. Smith, by Jim McIsaac/Getty.