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The annual draft of the NBA basketball championship, ie the event in which the thirty teams select the best players from colleges and abroad in turn, is scheduled for the night between Thursday and Friday. This year’s edition is eagerly awaited because among the many promises that will be chosen there is a 19-year-old Frenchman described as one of those generational talents that rarely happen, Victor Wembanyama. And to make this year’s draft even more impressive, there is also a rather symbolic anniversary: on June 26, twenty years ago, a historic edition of the event was held, which contributed to making NBA basketball what it is today. .
The first players drafted at New York’s Madison Square Garden that June 26 were LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. The first is one of the greatest athletes ever: at 38 he is the leader of the Los Angeles Lakers, this season he has become the best scorer in NBA history and is still trying to add one last title to the four won so far. Of these four, he obtained two in Miami with Bosh and Wade, two players included in the hall of fame of basketball, that is, among the best ever, despite not having retired for a long time. The other, Anthony, is the ninth goalscorer in league history and has recently announced his retirement.
The 2003 draft was something unrepeatable, due to the concentration of talent and the impact it had immediately on the championship. However, the success achieved by those four players made us forget that, immediately after LeBron James, the second choice of that draft was a then unknown eighteen-year-old Serbian, Darko Milicic, who had such an unfortunate and disappointing experience in the United States as to be still considered today one of the biggest fiascos in the league, if not il bigger.
Milicic came from Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia, and at the age of ten he lost his father, who was killed during the Yugoslav wars. He had never been particularly attracted to basketball, but he was directed to it due to his size and the great basketball tradition of the country. At fourteen he went to play for the team of Vrsac, a small town at the time at the top of what was left of the Yugoslav championship, that is, Serbian and Montenegrin. He stayed there for three years, playing as a center and without winning anything in particular, before being declared eligible for the NBA draft as a minor.
At the time, the Detroit Pistons were among the best teams in the league, yet in 2003 they strangely ended up with the second pick in the draft, moreover in a year in which all teams wanted to be at the top of the draft order. The Pistons’ situation was strange because even at the time the draft rewarded the least competitive teams by granting them the first picks, in order to rebalance the league and evenly distribute new players. However, the Pistons were lucky enough to earn the second call-up, despite having come close to the Finals the previous season, thanks to a series of chains born from a trade made six years earlier with the Vancouver Grizzlies.
Milicic, who at the time already exceeded 2 meters and 10 centimeters in height, was so highly recommended in professional basketball circles that the draft rules were changed specifically for him, given that he had not yet turned eighteen at the time of the first procedures. According to rather shared opinions, however, Milicic should never have arrived in the NBA in that way, and if instead it ended up like this, it was also due to the enthusiasm that the impact had by the German Dirk Nowitzki upon his arrival at the Dallas Mavericks had generated towards European basketball, in particular towards certain types of players.
That year the Pistons, who already had a complete and very competitive team, decided to add a talent to the starting rotation and preferred Milicic to players considered more ready like Anthony, Wade and Bosh (if only because they grew up in the American school system) . On the sporting side, the Pistons’ choice to focus on a young man to train for the future made sense, given that with the previously built team they played two consecutive finals, and won the first by beating the Lakers of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. But for Milicic that situation proved to be an obstacle which, combined with other factors, contributed decisively to the failure of his career.
In his first season, he played less than 5 minutes a game in the 34 games he was fielded, breaking his hand in one of those games. He saw the team win the 2004 title off the bench and never played more than 37 games for the next two years, averaging under 7 minutes per game. This scarce use soon had psychological effects on him, as he recounted in 2020 in a long interview granted to ESPN. He accused depressive symptoms which he initially vented with outbursts of anger, alcoholism and in general a lack of discipline which is instead indispensable for being a high-level athlete.
These problems he carried with him for a long time and in fact prevented him both from correcting his habits and from improving as a basketball player: some of his mistakes, often incomprehensible, have still been spinning online ever since. He was always considered physically ill-suited to the NBA’s style of play, slow to sustain his pace of play and too little aggressive on the court. So in 2006 the Pistons decided to sell him: still today one wonders what they could have become if three years earlier they had chosen another player among the most popular in that draft.
Over the next seven years, five teams, from the New York Knicks to the Boston Celtics, tried to get some good out of Milicic, but even as his use soared, the results never came. “Everyone in Boston was trying to find a way to keep me. But I had come to really hate basketball. I just wanted to go home and live another life,” he said recently. On November 17, 2012, just before a game, he went to the office of his coach, Doc Rivers, and told him that he would be returning to Serbia that same day, and so he told the rest of the team. The Celtics justified his return to Serbia for family reasons, but then everyone learned that Milicic had effectively stopped playing basketball.
In ten years in the NBA he averaged 18 minutes and 6 points per game, but he also earned about 52 million dollars, a sum that in Serbia “could be enough for two hundred years”, as he told ESPN. Once he returned to Novi Sad and briefly took up kickboxing, with that money he started an agri-food business with which he now owns extensive crops between Serbia, Russia and some African countries. Sometimes he is also seen popping up among the fans of Red Star Belgrade, the football team he supports, as happened few years ago in the away section of the Emirates Stadium in London for a cup match.
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