Random NBA Players: Darius Miles
The internet is filled with hundreds of thousands of nostalgic tales, but that’s to be expected. As a wise man once said, “Nostalgia is a mild form of depression,” and everyone can get a little blue when thinking back to 1997. With the summer sun shining, however, we’re in a cheery mood. And with the NBA having settled down after a busy first few weeks of offseason transactions, we thought it best to highlight some random NBA players who may have done their best work a decade or two ago.
This isn’t a list of your “Top 12 File Sharing Services of 2002” or “27 Ways Britney Ruled the VMAs.” No, this is …
Random Players, NBA Edition
We continue with Darius Miles.
By 2000, the NBA was ready for 18-year olds to move the needle.
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Kobe Bryant, by then just 21 but already coming off of his fourth season, had just been the tipping force in an NBA Finals victory for the Los Angeles Lakers. Kevin Garnett, by then, had been a three-time All-Star while acting as the biggest reason for an extended battle between labor and team owners. Tracy McGrady, barely a starter even in his third season, was about to receive a max contract after a fierce free agent bidding war. The Indiana Pacers, coming off of the team’s first NBA Finals appearance, were about to deal for Jermaine O’Neal to act as the team’s go-to two-way force.
Each of these players skipped college for the pros, and heading into the 2000 NBA draft very few had reason to believe that Darius Miles wasn’t going to join this new wave. Even if his time at East St. Louis High hadn’t earned him the sort of plaudits that Garnett, Bryant, and McGrady earned in their high school careers. Even if some of the rumors emanating him from individual team workouts (there was chatter that Miles appeared clueless and even physically limited during some of the most rudimentary drills) weren’t exactly promising.
The Los Angeles Clippers, widely regarded as the worst franchise in sports, selected him third overall. It was the highest a prep star had ever gone in the NBA draft, bettering Garnett by two spots.
Almost immediately, Miles became a martyr.
Charles Barkley, in his second-ever appearance as a TNT employee, lit into the Clipper organization, lamenting the fact that the Clippers routinely made money while losing heaps of games and letting their best players run off in free agency, telling the Turner crew that “people assume that every organization is trying to win, and there’s just no excuse for what the Clippers have been doing” and that “I don’t think the Clippers are a good environment for Miles.”
He may … he may have been right.
This isn’t to say the Clippers overreached. The 2000 draft is, at the very best, the second-worst draft in NBA history, so it isn’t as if the Clippers were wrong in selecting an 18-year old with huge hands, huge wingspan, a 6-9 frame, obvious handle and massive hops in Darius. Orlando, settling into its rebuilding project, wanted Miles and outlined a trade that offered up the fifth pick (presumed to be Marcus Fizer), Corey Maggette, and the tenth overall selection later in the round – a pick that turned into Rookie of the Year Mike Miller. The Magic were out to cut salary as they chased down Tim Duncan, Grant Hill and McGrady in free agency, to be sure, but they did want Darius.
Whether Los Angeles general manager Elgin Baylor was picking on Orlando’s behalf has been up for conjecture for 15 years, but the potential deal was scuttled when Bulls GM Jerry Krause (only out to ruin things, with Elton Brand already at power forward for Chicago) selected Fizer at No. 4 in the hopes that he would receive a similar offer.
The Clippers would be stuck with Miles, Krause received no offers and Chicago continued to stink, while Orlando missed out on Duncan, signed a broken Hill and wasted McGrady’s prime years. The whole night should have acted as an omen.
Any omen would seemingly be doubled-down upon when autumn showed up. Not only did Miles make the cover of Sports Illustrated’s season preview, he was pictured alongside Kevin Garnett in seemingly the final pose KG ever made without mean-mugging:
The emphasis was clear. Darius Miles is your New Version. We were at the turn of the century, and 1995 felt ever so long ago.
Despite their youth, Miles and the Clippers accomplished quite a bit over the next two years. Darius joined with fellow rookie Quentin Richardson, holdover Lamar Odom, Maggette and another rookie in Keyon Dooling (both acquired from Orlando in a consolation salary dump) to jump from 15 to 31 wins in what was one of the more exciting 31-win seasons I have ever had the pleasure to have known. It was my first year with League Pass, Ralph Lawler and Bill Walton were calling games (detailing the pleasures of both Sean Rooks’ free throw line jumper and Corona beer), and it was quite the experience.
Next year promised even more. The Clippers jumped six spots in the lottery to grab the second pick in the draft, then using that pick to deal 18-year old Tyson Chandler to Chicago for Elton Brand – a player who had just turned 22 while turning in two seasons of 20 and 10 ball.
Though Miles’ game stagnated in his second season, the Clippers were just a win behind the Utah Jazz with just a month left in the season for the final playoff spot in the killer Western Conference. This is the John Stockton/Karl Malone Utah Jazz, mind you. These are the Clippers, mind you. THE CLIPPERS.
By that time Miles and Richardson had already gotten the Spike Lee treatment in a shoe commercial:
This was insanity. Miles and Q-Rich combined to start just six games that season, and yet they were on endless loop in between timeouts. The NBA was still stuck ankle-deep in an era where it was hard to get to know those who weren’t on NBC every weekend, and yet this was the league’s most-played ad. With Clippers. With Q-Rich and D-Miles. Somehow it felt so … earned.
The Clippers would not make the playoffs that season. The team went 3-12 over the season’s final month, as the Jazz rolled into the postseason. That July, with the Cavaliers clearly looking to tank games in the hopes of securing the eventual rights to then-high school senior LeBron James, Cleveland offered the Clips a sweetheart deal: Andre Miller, the league’s leading assist man, for your 20-year old project that still can’t shoot. Los Angeles could not say “no.”
From there, a lingering knee injury crippled Miles’ lone year in Cleveland. John Hollinger, writing in his Basketball Prospectus, pointed out that “it looks like [Miles] may go through his whole career as the player he was at 18.”
Things rebounded slightly in Miles second season with Cleveland, the presence of James will do that to a guy, but he was dealt midseason to Portland for former teammate Jeff McInnis and the sublime Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje. Starting 40 of the 42 games with a middling Blazers squad, Miles took off as a slashing small forward. As they tended to do in those days, the Blazers went on to bid against themselves to retain the services of the restricted free agent, signing him to a six-year, $48 million contract after 42 pretty good games.
The 2004-05 was depressing as hell, so much so that it almost made the departed Rasheed Wallace look like a veteran leader of sorts. Blazers coach Maurice Cheeks could not rein in his combustible, mismatched crew, as the Blazers missed the playoffs again. Midseason, Miles got into a shouting match in the locker room with Cheeks, dropping the N-word on the African-American coach while refusing to leave the locker room. Miles knew that Cheeks was a dead coach walking and acted as much. Cheeks did also knew the sad score, returning Miles to the lineup and occasionally starting him.
He didn’t start him on the night of April 19, when this oddity happened:
Miles scored 47 points in that effort, the second-highest output by a reserve in the last 30 years of NBA play, working against a playoff-bound Nuggets team that was (mostly) trying.
As a result of all this good cheer, the Blazers were outfitted with a No. 5 pick in a rather terrible 2005 draft, and they chose Martell Webster – the penultimate preps-to-pros draft pick in NBA history, as the league and its players’ union outlawed the practice the following month. Miles turned in the best scoring season of his career in 2005-06 at 14 a game in 32 minutes, but he was hardly helping anything. He still couldn’t shoot, he was still biting on endless head fakes, by then his rebounding was poor even for a shooting guard, and he could even crack 60 percent from the line.
Late in the season, he injured the right knee that had been bugging him since the 2001-02 season. Knowing that poor rehabilitation habits were the reason Miles never got over that malady, as he jumped from Los Angeles to Cleveland, Portland held its noses and initiated microfracture surgery. He would miss the next two NBA seasons, in an era where others were coming back after 10-12 months (or even earlier) from the surgery.
Towards the end of that second season in 2007-08, the Blazers pressured the NBA to hire an independent doctor to confirm that Miles’ knee was unfit for NBA use, which would lead to his retirement, guaranteed money for Darius, insurance money for Portland, and salary cap room for a Blazers team that finally appeared to be turning a corner. A doctor confirmed that Miles’ knee was shot, and Miles submitted retirement papers.
This is where things get even stranger.
Miles attempted to make a training camp roster in the fall of 2008, but not after some team (you can probably guess whom) decided to leak the news that Miles would have to serve a ten-game suspension upon his return to the NBA for a drug offense (per the league’s policies, either a fourth positive test for marijuana, or a first positive test for a performance enhancing drug). After being cut in training camp by the Kevin Garnett-led Boston Celtics, Miles was picked up by the Memphis Grizzlies.
Portland then threatened to sue any NBA team that signed Miles, claiming that they could prove that any contract handed to Miles’ had more to do with other teams trying to screw over Portland’s cap and luxury tax situation than it did wanting to resurrect Miles’ career. If Miles were to play ten games in 2008-09, $18 million would be tossed back onto Portland’s cap and tax filings. The Players’ Association, rightfully threatened collusion charges of its own, and Miles eventually stuck to his plan to sign with the Memphis Grizzlies.
He played just under 300 (pretty good, though in garbage time) minutes with Memphis, but also 34 games. This meant the money went back onto Portland’s books. Spurned in free agency that summer by 30-year old Hedo Turkoglu, Portland eventually signed – you guessed it – Andre Miller to a moderate free agent contract.
Miles hasn’t played a regular season NBA game since, while, cruelly, both Garnett and Bryant will suit up in 2015-16.
The question about whether or not 18-year olds should be drafted into the NBA is for another day. On one hand, this is America, dammit – if an employer wants to employ someone for their skills, both employer and employee should have the right to argue for such an agreement. On the other hand, the NBA is a private league that collectively bargains with its players, players who have argued that they do not want to share the court with players just out of high school. No person has the right to play in the NBA.
Darius Miles’ lost career has everything to do with how perfect things have to go for both player and the organization that drafts him, something that is as consistent for 23-year olds as it is 18-year olds. Miles had his obstacles – the injuries, a terrible Clipper organization that got by on the talents of its youngsters and coach Alvin Gentry alone – but just about everything else behind his disappointing career was on him.
It was fun there, though, for a little while. Two pounds, top of the head.
Previous Entries: Tom Gugliotta, Ron Mercer, Terrell Brandon. John “Hot Rod” Williams.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
