Auburn's coaching staff spent four years telling Atlanta-area forward Jabari Smith that he'd be a perfect fit for what the Tigers hoped to accomplish.

At the time, Bruce Pearl's championship vision sounded like a pipe dream.

Then Auburn won the SEC regular-season title in 2018, the SEC tournament a year later and advanced to the 2019 Final Four in Minneapolis. Additionally, Chuma Okeke became a first-round pick during the 2019 NBA Draft and now Isaac Okoro is on the precipice of becoming a lottery pick in the 2020 NBA Draft.

Pearl's ideas no longer sound crazy. And now Smith, Rivals.com's No. 4 overall player, has become Auburn's most highly rated signee ever after filing his National Letter of Intent Tuesday.

"My first reaction to something like that is that I want to thank Chuma and I want to thank Issac and Jared (Harper) and Bryce (Brown) and Anfernee (McLemore) and Danjel (Purifoy) — all the guys who came before," Pearl said Tuesday night. "Without them, we're not even in position. We've been recruiting him for a long time. We had to earn our way with him and his family."

Smith was more than simply a five-star prospect. His father, Jabari Smith Sr., was a star center at LSU from 1998-2000 and later spent six seasons in the NBA. The younger Smith, who lives in Sandy Creek, Ga., also is an excellent student and earned offers from dozens of high-profile programs including North Carolina and, of course, LSU.

Smith said he chose Auburn for the family feel it offers and the way Pearl never seemed artificial.

"He just told me that he was going to push me every day. He told me we were going to win and have fun," Smith said in an interview with Rivals.com's Krysten Peek. "And just the family atmosphere down there at Auburn, there's nothing like it. It's not just winning and all that. You've got to go to a program that's going to show you love and overall push you and not treat you different than anyone else."

Pearl said Tuesday that he's never coached a player quite like Smith, who currently stands 6-foot-10 yet has dribbling and shooting skills on par with most guards. When asked for a comparison, the Auburn coach pondered the question briefly before mentioning Kevin Garnett.

Yeah, the guy who's in the Hall of Fame and made the All-Star team 12 times.

"Kevin Garnett was a big, skilled young kid and that's who Jabari is," Pearl said. "Jabari's got to get ... stronger. That's going to be an issue for him to get physically ready. That big guy, that stretch 4. That fourth guard. He's skilled and quick enough to play on the wing, though. I think he's going to be really interchangeable."