Milicic was selected 2nd overall in the 2003 draft, and you pretty much know all the rest. His NBA career has been fraught with benchings, trades, public humiliation, and derision. And he's still only 22; he'll turn 23 in June. He wasn't even 18 when the Pistons plucked him off the board, right after LeBron James, and right before Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade.
No, it wasn't one of Joe Dumars's better picks. It wasn't one of the better ones in league history, either. In fact, it might have been among the very worst. It has a lot of Sam Bowie-before-Michael Jordan about it.
But I bring up Milicic because James Jahnke in today's Freep reports that, according to an interview Darko did with Reuters news service recently, his confidence is waning and he seems to blame it on his sordid past.
Milicic, now with the Memphis Grizzlies, his third NBA team, is averaging 6.8 points in 24.8 minutes. And he's running out of things to blame his career on.
"I have to get better, play better, do better. I'm trying and I'm going to keep trying ... They (the Grizzlies) gave me a chance. They gave me everything. They gave me time to play, they tell me to just shoot the ball and play your game. Now it is all on me."
But despite all that confidence the Grizzlies have tried to instill in Milicic -- the lack of which he kept insisting contributed greatly to his flops in Detroit and Orlando -- things are again regressing.
"Now I'm losing my confidence, I don't know why," he told Reuters. "There is a lot of stuff going on in my head. All the stuff that happened to me before has left some scars."
Ahh -- there it is, in that last sentence.
Milicic clearly still wants to play the "Detroit hurt me" card, even today, some five years after the Pistons drafted him. That's no crime; 18 year-olds handle things differently. I'm not going to begrudge Milicic's feelings, though I think he needs to move on with his life. But his "scarring" defense is symptomatic of what can happen when you thrust kids into pro sports, especially the NBA. And especially with the second overall pick, for goodness sakes.
It could be, of course, that Darko will continue to forever blame his bust status on the Pistons ruining him by not playing him while he was here. He'll always hold that card, I suppose. And it won't do him one bit of good to keep looking backward. He's only 22; what in the world is he passing up by boo-hooing about his formative years with the Pistons? Maybe he should look no further than Chauncey Billups, his old teammate, who was rejected several times before finding gold with the Pistons. Would Billups have risen to perennial All-Star status, leader of a championship-caliber team, if he'd worn a sour puss about his time in Boston, or Denver, or Minnesota? But see, Billups wasn't drafted in his teen years.
There's a great deal to be said about maturity. A 21-year-old doesn't necessarily possess it, either, but he still has a much better chance of weathering the storm than an 18-year-old. Darko Milicic seems to still want to blame his Detroit years for his current struggles.
It's all in his head, and you can make a case that it was never truly screwed on properly, from the moment he entered the league. Lots of times it isn't, when you're talking about teenagers.
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