More mature Miles takes another shot at NBA
By Rick Bonnell
rbonnell@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Tuesday, Jun. 15, 2010
Darius Miles of the Memphis Grizzlies looks on during a game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. FILE PHOTO (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
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The obvious question is why?
Why would a guy with Darius Miles' money, who's been out of basketball more than a year, who suffered a knee injury so severe it was declared career-ending, show up for a free-agent camp?
Simple, Miles said: He has a 2-year-old son who never saw him play. He'd like the kid to have that memory.
He's healthy - healthier than he's been in years - and the Charlotte Bobcats seem genuinely interested. Larry Brown has spent a decade telling 6-foot-9 combo forward Miles how much he'd like to coach him. It was like a mantra: "Darius ... How are you? ... Wanna be on my team?"
Miles doesn't pretend to be the freakish athlete that once made him the third pick of the 2000 draft. But he doesn't need all that for a team searching for affordable options at the end of the bench.
Miles said he's reinventing himself as a player. It sounds similar to what former Charlotte Hornet Larry Johnson did after his back wore out. The Johnson who finished his career as a New York Knick wasn't nearly such a physical force, but what he lost in explosion, he compensated for with refinement.
"Those injuries, they make you mature," Miles said after the first of three days in a free-agent minicamp at Time Warner Cable Arena. "They make your game mature - they make you work on other things.
"I had a God gift and never thought it would be taken away from me. I probably would have never worked on my jump shot - never ! - because I could always get to the basket and jump higher than everybody else. But it got to a point where you can't do that no more."
In 2006, he had micro-fracture surgery to repair his right knee. The Portland Trail Blazers had that injury declared "career-ending" to protect the franchise under the league's insurance and salary cap-management provisions.
Miles was supposed to play along, not a bad deal since he'd continue to collect about $9million a season. Except he wasn't comfortable giving up the sport.
So he rehabbed and trained, and the Memphis Grizzlies played him 34 games two seasons ago.
He sat out the 2009-10 season, after a misdemeanor marijuana-possession charge in Memphis.
This isn't the first time Brown has taken on a veteran with a past (see Allen Iverson, Rasheed Wallace and Stephen Jackson), so he's happy to explore what Miles has left.
"He's in pretty good shape, he's still relatively young and he has a real chance," Brown said. "Been 10 years I tried to get him in a gym. Finally did it."
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