- [Narrator] This is the legacy of Darko Milicic.
(soft contemplative music)
NBA fans will remember Milicic not
for who he was but for who he wasn't.
In the legendary 2003 NBA draft,
Darko was the only top five selection
who didn't become a star.
Because of that, because of the hype that thrust him
into that group and a pro career that betrayed the hype,
Milicic is remembered as one
of the biggest draft busts ever.
He even uses that word himself,
but one doesn't simply become a bust.
Let's examine Darko Milicic's NBA journey for what it is,
and let's trace the overwhelming hype
that rendered it a disappointment.
Let's meet Darko in the "Prism."
First, an exercise.
Let's put aside how Darko Milicic arrived in the NBA,
and let's just run through what he did when he got there.
We'll read straight off the page.
Milicic was an 18 year old,
one of the youngest NBA players ever
on the roster of the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons,
already one of the best teams in the East,
building toward a championship that very season.
The seven-foot center didn't play much as a rookie,
but he did become the youngest player ever to win a ring.
The following season,
Milicic still didn't hold down a rotation spot.
The Pistons were still really good,
and he was still a teenager.
Nothing outta the ordinary.
When a new coach still couldn't find a regular role
for the kid, Detroit traded him to Orlando mid-season.
With the Magic, Milicic carved out an everyday bench role.
He scored a bit, he rebounded,
and he blocked quite a few shots, especially in '06-'07,
his first full season with Orlando.
That performance was well timed.
Milicic hit free agency in the summer of 2007
and accepted a substantial new contract.
The Memphis Grizzlies initially played Darko big minutes
beside one Gasol brother and then the other one,
but then an ill-timed injury
destabilized Darko's rotation spot.
Back to the bench.
Darko got traded, got traded again,
and did enough in Minnesota
to receive another guaranteed contract
and another starting role.
He protected the rim, he pulled down boards,
and generally served as a solid complement
to the younger Kevin Love.
The Wolves were really, really excited to have him,
like biblically excited,
but as time passed and coaches changed,
the Wolves came to prefer other big men and smaller lineups.
They eventually waived Milicic's contract in 2012.
After a super brief stint in Boston, that was it.
Darko Milicic retired from NBA basketball at just 27.
That's young, but his resume resembles that
of an ordinary successful journeyman,
468 games across 10 seasons and six teams.
A couple hundred games started
with fifth-option statistics to match,
multi-year contracts collecting millions
of dollars in salary, some big nights,
some playoff experience, and yes, a ring.
So those are the facts in a vacuum.
Now we will exit the vacuum
and remove our pressurized suits.
Darko Milicic was the second pick in the 2003 draft right
after LeBron, right before Melo, Bosh, and Wade.
If that's how you arrive in the league,
10 years of marginal but fine basketball
equal huge disappointment.
So why didn't he live up to his draft status?
Sam Borden's 2020 piece for ESPN gets some candid answers
to that question.
Answer number one
is that Darko never really loved basketball.
People encouraged young Darko to play
because he was extremely tall.
It wasn't his idea.
He stuck with basketball because he saw it
as a way out of the conflict and instability
of his life in an area still shaken by war.
And arriving in Detroit didn't just present a lack
of basketball opportunities.
There was also just the simple fact
of being a teenager in a foreign country.
Darko acted like one.
His first year in Detroit started fine.
Darko sounded focused in training camp,
and his legendary stickler of a coach,
Larry Brown, claimed to love the kid.
But as Brown tried to shape Darko, the youngster bristled.
Brown insisted he sharpen his big man fundamentals
rather than roam the floor as a more versatile forward,
and he gave Darko nearly zero playing time.
His whole job was practice, which Darko could not tolerate.
So practice got worse.
(contemplative music)
He dogged it, he acted out, he mouthed off.
He practiced coming off zero hours
of sleep and more than a few drinks.
Darko was immature, and a contender
like the Pistons didn't have time for that,
so they traded him to Orlando.
After lashing out at his former team,
Darko promptly disappointed his new one in the same way.
Within days of joining the Magic,
Darko whined publicly about his lack of playing time.
Fans wanted to see a "free Darko,"
but the muse of the classic blog never worked hard enough
to free himself from the bench.
Magic coach Brian Hill saw talent
but too little effort, too little toughness.
Soon after Darko left Orlando
to sign his first big contract with the Grizzlies,
his penchant for rage drew public attention.
He said some truly wild shit about referees
at the 2007 FIBA World Cup,
and he famously shredded his jersey on the floor.
It's impressive, I'll give him that.
That stuff seemed funny,
but Darko was struggling behind the scenes,
drinking more and more, moping,
and venting his frustration on the walls of his home.
As his jobs and minutes got jerked around,
he considered walking away from basketball multiple times,
but some team always intervened,
sure that they could fix him.
Darko straight up told Minnesota GM David Kahn not
to trade for him.
He'd ruin the team.
He was bad for chemistry, but the Wolves dealt
for Darko anyway and then paid him to stay.
Coach Kurt Rambis saw a player lacking confidence
but gave Darko the biggest opportunity of his career.
Then the losing Wolves canned Rambis.
His replacement, Rick Adelman,
took less than a season to get completely fed up
with Milicic and tell the whole world his center
was out of shape, unmotivated, and not worthy of a big role.
Still, Milicic got an opportunity the following year
with the Celtics until Darko himself pulled the plug
after just one game.
Darko Milicic fully admits he's a bust and puts a lot
of the blame on his own attitude and habits as a young man.
He had neither the temperament nor the will
nor the circumstances to develop
into a great pro basketball player.
But it's not like Darko gave himself a decade's worth
of opportunities.
NBA teams did that,
convinced that they could capture whatever people saw
in teenage Darko that made him the second pick.
So we must visit that Darko.
How and why were professional talent evaluators so wrong
about him?
What did they see?
To begin with, Milicic grew up in the former Yugoslavia,
a place that, in the early 2000s,
NBA people still regarded with over the top exoticism,
as some sort of mystical land of giants.
And, well, this particular kid did have an impressive body.
As a 17 year old, Milicic was seven feet tall,
lean and powerful, and he supposedly played like it.
That last part was the hook.
While Darko was developing in Europe, some older tall guys
from the continent hit the NBA as lanky finesse players.
At best, a big European guy could correct
for his assumed softness by just being super talented,
like Dirk Nowitzki or Pau Gasol.
At worst, well, when Darko entered the NBA conversation,
the Nuggets had just burned 2002's fifth draft pick
on Nikoloz Tskitishvili.
Skita had already come to embody the stereotype
of the tall, soft white guy from Europe
who couldn't cut it in the NBA.
Darko did not fit the stereotype.
He earned minutes by banging down low, the rebounds, blocks,
and dunks Americans expected of American players.
And unlike Tskitishvili, for instance, Darko was playing
and producing for his club team among and against adults.
So it seems like Darko was just foreign enough.
He enjoyed the mystique of being tall
and talented in a far off land,
but he'd also played a lot of pro ball for a teenager,
and the type of ball he played looked familiar.
Of course, hype requires a hype man,
and Darko had a great one.
Donnie Nelson built his reputation
as a pioneer of talent scouting overseas.
Most recently,
he had pushed the Dallas Mavericks to draft Nowitzki.
Well, Nelson was perhaps the first and most prominent person
to broadcast hyperbole about Milicic,
comparing him favorably
to the hottest American prospect maybe ever.
In 2002, Nelson and his father, Mavs head coach Don Nelson,
got suspended for, according to the NBA,
illegally attending a workout
in which Milicic participated long
before he was draft eligible.
It's hard to think of a better advertisement
for a prospect than scouts getting in trouble
for being in the same gym as you.
The media followed.
In January 2003, while LeBron James had most people fixated
on nationally televised high school games,
ESPN's Chad Ford visited Serbia in the dead of winter.
Even Darko was surprised to have a visitor.
Ford's words crystallized the hype.
He couldn't quite nail a comparison
or role model for Darko's game, so Darko helped him out.
What about Kevin Garnett?
Picking a Black American player as his role model
was exactly what people wanted to hear,
and Darko understood that.
Here, again, Milicic got to have it both ways.
His style defied the stereotype
of the soft European big man.
He dunked and posted up and stuff.
But by playing pro ball overseas,
he also dodged the reflexive
and sometimes pretty nasty assumptions made
of Black American prospects like LeBron
and a young Garnett who "had it easy"
against their fellow kids.
In point of fact,
Milicic had hardly watched Kevin Garnett play,
but he knew what NBA teams would wanna hear.
And those NBA teams were scouting him in person,
but they were way early, or so it seemed.
At the time Ford visited, Darko's June birthday meant he
would not be draft eligible that year
until a few weeks later when David Stern changed the cutoff
for international players.
By surprise decree, Darko was now '03 eligible.
The hype accelerated.
One wonders if that sudden move-up forced teams
to cram a bunch of homework they'd previously been putting
off for the following season.
Joe Dumars, who was Pistons GM when they drafted Milicic,
certainly makes it sound like they
hadn't done enough research on the kid.
With similar hindsight, you can spot red flags.
When Chad Ford visited again,
he heard Darko had been throwing tantrums in practice,
acting petulant around coaches and teammates.
Locals shook their head at the idea
of him being a super high draft pick.
Darko himself admitted he had no idea
what an NBA team would expect of him.
Nevertheless, Darko's hype was second to all but LeBron,
the most hyped prospect in basketball history,
not to mention the one who somehow lived up to it.
For a few people, even that 1-2 ranking was debatable,
but not for the Cavaliers, who won the first pick.
Then, thanks to a trade from six years prior
and a perfectly lucky outcome,
the second pick fell to Detroit,
a team that really didn't need it
and certainly hadn't been preparing
as if Darko would be available to them at all,
let alone in 2003.
The Pistons had done some homework, though.
They had scouted Milicic and, funnily enough,
had gotten a private viewing the same day
of that lottery surprise.
At the time, the Pistons were on the road,
playing the New Jersey Nets
in the Eastern Conference Finals.
They held shoot around at John J College in Manhattan where,
in another gym, Darko was practicing.
Well, who else but Chad Ford wandered over
to the Piston side of the gym
and asked if they wanted to come watch Darko.
They did, and they were blown away by his skills,
his physical attributes, all of him,
and then they won the chance to draft him hours later.
The Pistons then brought Darko in
for some actual scheduled workouts.
Piston scouts, including the legendary Will Robinson,
saw limitless potential, like historically so,
and this is someone
who actually remembered Wilt Chamberlain,
and Robinson wasn't alone.
Detroit's strength and conditioning coach
saw an amazing natural athlete.
Even Pistons players weighed in with affirmation.
Coach Brown saw, or at least says now that he saw,
a player who wasn't in good enough shape.
He wanted to see Milicic run with some
of the other top prospects, but so smitten,
so sure were the Pistons
that the other prospects knew not to even bother.
Detroit had their guy instead of multiple superstars,
instead of more productive centers,
instead of players from abroad
who'd have much more successful careers,
and that is how this ends up being your whole reputation.
If the equation for a bust is hype divided by success,
well, Darko Milicic had an ordinary NBA career
that would be unremarkable if not
were this absolutely massive numerator of hype preceding it.
Milicic probably wasn't as talented as he seemed
and found neither the environment
nor the inner fortitude to develop.
He knew how to sell himself, though,
in interviews and in the gym,
and he had a ton of external factors working in his favor,
stereotypes, timing, surprise, and coincidence.
Hype is a potent thing,
enough to overpower your attempts to escape it
and enough to define your legacy for Undershooting it.
(soft ethereal music)
(item shuffles) (soft music)