Among the most resounding flops in NBA history, Kwame Brown is a must. It is also the major piece in the case against Michael Jordan when assessing his competence as an officer of an NBA franchise.
Brown, pick n ° 1 of the 2001 Draft, never managed to live up to the expectations placed on him by MJ, then sports boss of the Washington Wizards. Jordan is still considered to be the man behind this failure today. And yet …
One of his former players, Etan Thomas, Kwame Brown’s teammate in the early 2000s, thinks we’re too hard on Michael Jordan on this particular issue. It is rather to Doug Collins, head coach in DC at the time, who would be responsible for this failure. This is what Thomas explained during his interview with Mike Domagala.
Dirty laundry and fishy memory, Kwame Brown and Michael Beasley weren’t made for the NBA
“Kwame Brown was the best player before this Draft. I saw it with my own eyes. They brought in all the best big men of the year. There was Tyson Chandler, Eddy Curry and others. Kwame Brown them destroyed There was no picture.
It wasn’t Michael Jordan who ruined Kwame, but Doug Collins. He had like a personal vendetta launched against Kwame. Sometimes, after the matches, I called him to see how it was going because the manager let go on him. Whenever things were wrong, he needed someone to blame rather than going straight to Michael Jordan.
It was number 1 in the Draft and things did not go as planned. But it was much more complicated than that. When Tyson Chandler landed at the Bulls, he didn’t have the pressure to play for Michael Jordan. He could play in a relaxed way. “
“The relationship between Kwame Brown and MJ was good. MJ wasn’t the problem, it was Doug Collins.”
As a reminder, Kwame Brown had directly made the leap between high school and the NBA. He is a boy a little on his own who arrived in the league and who did not really know how to manage himself, as Amin Elhassan explained a few months ago.
“It was a few weeks before the start of the season. Kwame Brown didn’t show up to practice for a few days and no one knew where he was. So the Wizards called his agent, who tried to call but eventually made it home.
Brown explained to him that he was not coming because he had nothing more to wear. He showed her the closet with all his dirty laundry. The officer then asked him why he was not going to drop them off at the laundromat. ‘Because I don’t know how to do it,’ Brown replied.
He could have told someone about it or given someone a ticket to get their laundry and take care of it, but no. He did not have the minimum skills to be operational and to function in life “.
This harsh anecdote shows how athleticism and technique aren’t everything … even in the NBA. Especially in the NBA should we say, because this environment is clearly not made for fragile people. Too competitive, too hard for players who are too lonely or far from their families. This was particularly the case with Kwame Brown. He retired in 2013, having worn the jerseys of 7 franchises, including the Los Angeles Lakers, and will forever be considered a huge mess.
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