He doesn’t care about your whining. He doesn’t care about the extensive arguments we’ve all had about Kevin Durant’s (prolonged) offseason dominance. He doesn’t care about the disagreements that National Basketball Player’s Association and the NBA owners have had both internally and externally. He just doesn’t care.
Nikola Pekovic said that Darko Milicic has no intention of playing overseas during NBA lockout. Milicic is fishing, one of his main hobbies
Because he’d rather be fishing. And he is. Where he’s fishing, there is no David Stern, no BeÅŸiktaÅŸ, no fourth quarter collapse. In a summer that has derailed so many plans, it’s nice to know someone’s still able to live out their dreams.
We’ve known Darko to be an avid fisherman since that one time he told us so early last season. Addressing his early shooting woes (he shot 29% from the field in the first two weeks of the regular season), Milicic noted that the only remedy would be to continue shooting. As he told HoopsWorld: Â ”Those are my shots. If I can’t make those shots, then I can go fishing.”
Sure enough, his percentages went up over the course of the season. Unfortunately for him, his percentages were still trash. Milicic, a woefully limited offensive option, averaged 8.4 shots a game — more than 53% of which were in the post…where he managed to convert only 37.6%, according to Synergy Sports Technology. So when Darko uses one of his favorite pastimes as a form of negative reinforcement, what are we supposed to think? I don’t exactly punish myself  with Chick-Fil-A sandwiches… It’s all a bit fishy, is all I’m saying.
Perhaps it’s an acknowledgement of futility. Maybe the abandonment of what little shooting touch he had is real. Maybe Darko is just being a man of his word. He played 69 games and couldn’t make those shots consistently, so he’s fishing. And if he’s acknowledged the inefficiency of his offensive game, there is new hope that he might eschew it all together. Think of how those eight extra possessions could be divvied! The possibilities are truly endless.
As unlikely as it’s seemed for the past few years, Minnesota has given us real reason for optimism this offseason. They not only nabbed the best player available in the draft, but also the best coach available. With the intrigue of Ricky Rubio and a new, sounder offense, the Timberwolves could be an absolute joy to watch. Or it could unravel, and Darko (and the rest of the team) could fall back into old, awful habits. In any case, we’ve fallen for the Wolves, either wisely or blindly, (lefty) hook, line, and sinker.
So here we are. It’s been joked about and threatened on the internet, in the papers and around the league for a while.
Darko Milicic has been such a disappointment in this league that he’s been a running joke for seven seasons now. That’s right; he’s been running longer than The Office, 30 Rock, and is three seasons away from being a longer running comedy than Seinfeld.
Now a lot of that is unfair scrutiny on Darko Milicic and he really shouldn’t be the ire of ridicule amongst basketball fans. It’s not his fault he was taken second in a draft that put him ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Chris Kaman, David West, Boris Diaw, Travis Outlaw, Kirk Hinrich, TJ Ford, Leandro Barbosa, Kendrick Perkins and Josh Howard. It’s not his fault that as an unproven and relatively unknown prospect he didn’t fall to the second round like Rashard Lewis and Maciej Lampe. None of that is his fault and he shouldn’t be criticized for something Joe Dumars reached on.
Just like with this new contract with the Timberwolves. He’s signing a four-year, $20 million deal to probably be the starting center for the Wolves. It’s not his fault he was offered this insane contract. It’s not his fault David Kahn’s comically incompetent stylings have lead to Darko Milicic’s agent doing back flips and pinching himself to make sure this isn’t a dream.
Darko isn’t a bad player and I’m not opposed to him being on the Wolves. He’s also not a good player and not someone I want getting an almost fully guaranteed four-year commitment. People don’t even like agreeing to a two-year plan to get a new cell phone and the Wolves have doubled that with Darko. The money isn’t bad either; it’s just unnecessary.
Here’s what they’ll try to sell you on with Darko: he’s the defensive presence the Wolves have needed inside. Here’s the problem with that sales pitch: it’s a load of crap.
In his time with the Wolves last season, Darko was ranked 420th in the NBA in Points Per Possession given up defensively (according to Synergy Sports). 420th!!!! If all of the teams in the NBA had a full 15-man roster then there would be 450 players. And that means only 30 guys would be worse than Darko at defense. In the post, he was a lot better at a ranking of 215th. I’m sorry but that doesn’t exactly scream progress to me.
I like the fact that the Wolves are bringing Nikola Pekovic over from Europe. He’s shown some decent promise by putting up big scoring numbers for such a young big man. The problem is that the importing of Pekovic and the re-signing of Darko Milicic is what David Kahn had to do to justify trading away Al Jefferson. While Al Jefferson isn’t exactly the messiah in post player form, he’s certainly much better than the two options being brought in to replace him.
Some will argue that Al Jefferson being replaced by Darko is an upgrade on defense. But looking back at Synergy Sports, Al Jefferson ranked 278th in overall defense and 187th in post defense. He’s not exactly making Bill Russell watch his legacy here but at the same time, he was better than Darko defensively. So how can that be an upgrade?
The Milicic move is just an example of faking progress and it’s something that bad decision-makers do in the NBA. They give guys unnecessary contracts and pitch them as reclamation projects on the verge of boosting a franchise when in reality it’s just a way to distract people from focusing on the two horrible drafts you’ve executed in your one year on the job. Darko Milicic is an okay player. He’s not an answer or a cure-all for a team. He’s not a guy I would eat up precious cap space with for four years, ESPECIALLY when there is a new collective bargaining agreement coming in a year and everybody assumes the cap flexibility is going to get a lot tighter.
And this is where we are with the Wolves. There is not an ounce of foresight in the decision-making that goes on. A year ago, we were pitched two point guards with back-to-back picks in the first six picks of the draft. Overall, there were five guards (four of them point guards) selected. Kevin Love and Al Jefferson went through trade value assassinations over the last few months and instead of bringing in the proper dominant big man or defensive presence to balance out their weaknesses, the team decided to take four small forwards in the draft and elicit numerous five-year plan jokes over the past week. Now, they’re carving out an increasingly precious amount of cap space for a guy that doesn’t defend better than what they have, is worse offensively and was on the verge of going back to Europe because nobody wanted to play with him.
The worst part about it is Kevin Pritchard is just sitting out there, waiting for a job offer to be tossed his way. Putting him in the same division of the team that fired him would guarantee you getting the most genius and diabolical team building we’ve seen in a long time. Instead, we’re left with a guy who flips D-League franchises like they’re used cars, alienates every single coworker and colleague he has and then performs personnel moves that are so abhorrent that they can only be correctly classified as espionage.
I’m not mad at Darko one bit. He was offered way more money and way more years than he’s worth or proven to deserve and he took the contract. We’d all do the exact same thing. I’m mad at the smug face with incompetent motives and execution that is single-handedly keeping a two-second clip from a sci-fi movie that came out nearly 30 years ago preserved like it’s saturated in formaldehyde.
This move likely means the trading of Al Jefferson, whose trade value was ultimately shattered over the past two weeks when David Kahn shopped him around for anybody and everybody that has ever picked up a basketball before. He’s found a way to shoot himself in the foot with these upcoming trade negotiations before he even picked up the gun. I don’t know why any of this surprises me anymore. Actually, the sad thing is that it doesn’t. You expect to be defeated before anything even happens. It’s depressing. It’s life as a David Kahn Refugee.
Devine’s got the Christmas NBA blog post on lockdown.
I’ve done campy Christmas posts in the past. I’m not going to this year. But if I was, I’d want to be like Devine.
/swoon
Also, I don’t know how I’m going to live with knowing Darko’s gone. I mean, I know he’s already gone, we might as well speak about him in the past tense. But to leave America with such bitter feelings about the peak of your profession. Sad.
