Dallas Mavs point guard Dennis Smith Jr. has been shockingly devastated by the destruction caused in his native Fayetteville in North Carolina, as Hurricane Florence had no mercy when coming through town, leaving thousands of families struggling and out of a home.

Smith, who played high school basketball in North Carolina and starred for North Carolina State during his lone year as a freshman, noted his level of preoccupation was altered after first hearing from his father.

“I first started worrying when my dad called me about it,” Dennis Smith Jr. told Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated. “They said it was coming directly to Fayetteville and by the time it got there it could be a Category 5. So that’s when I started calling some family members to make sure they were straight. I was hoping that the people that could get out would get out. But I also knew that the Smith family wasn’t going nowhere. My dad told me he was going to get his boat ready and he had a generator, so he was going to stay put.”

Thirty two people have been found dead since Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas in Sept. 14 and more than 2,600 people have been rescued, 81 of them in Smith's hometown of Fayetteville.

“I can’t believe it,” Smith said. “A real big military truck was halfway submerged in water? I can’t believe I am seeing something like that. … I heard the Cape Fear River was at 50 feet.”

Cape Fear is projected to be at 62 1/2 feet by Wednesday according to the Fayetteville News & Observer. This has been by far the wettest tropical cyclone on record and one that has displaced as many as 1,202 people, now in Fayetteville-area shelters as of Tuesday morning, according to the newspaper.

Nevertheless, it is good to see the young Mavs player take notice of happenings around him.