From today's Detroit Free Press -- same mentally weak prima donna
Darko. Enough excuses for this clown. What an utter waste.
BY DREW SHARP
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
ORLANDO -- Four days into a fresh opportunity at redemption, and
Darko Milicic is already sulking. The name on the uniform is different, but
the seat at the end of the bench hasn't changed.
He doesn't get it. And he probably never will.
He can't even play on a team that has given up hope on the season.
"I didn't come here to sit on the bench," Milicic said Thursday after the
Orlando Magic's practice. "I tell myself that everything will be fine here,
but right now, nothing has changed. I want to play. I need to play. I learn
nothing sitting on the bench."
Nothing has changed. Darko still blames other factors for his inactivity.
He eagerly embraced his emancipation from the Pistons, somehow
convincing himself that liberation from his self-described "nightmare"
would immediately register into consistent playing time with the Magic.
But Darko didn't play one second in his second game with the Magic,
Wednesday at New Jersey.
"You have to ask them why," Darko said of the coaches.
Magic coach Brian Hill offered the same refrain that grew age lines in
Detroit the past three years. Darko has "tremendous upside," Hill said, but
he has to "learn his new surroundings" and grow comfortable with the
situation.
In other words, he needs to wake up.
But the Magic will discover what the Pistons reluctantly learned before
trading him last week. Darko has an unyielding sense of entitlement that
will prevent him from fully taking advantage of his physical gifts. He
equates playing time with something gift-wrapped under a Christmas
tree.
"There's no disputing the kid's skill level," Hill said.
The coach gave Milicic one-on-one tutelage Thursday, initially letting the
7-footer rain threes with unconscious consistency, then schooling him on
the low block. Once again, there was the liquid ease in which Darko
flowed off his pivot, slamming the ball home or gently kissing it off the
glass.
And again came amazement from observers.
How could the Pistons not find even a little room for somebody of this
much potential?
But those who caught the solo show during Darko's first workout in his
new home will discover that those skills diminish in a five-on-five setting.
It's time for Darko to grow up, sack up and maybe wise up. He still holds
a grudge against the Pistons for how he thinks they treated him.
"I was pissed," said Milicic, who scored two points in four minutes in his
Orlando debut. "It was always the same story, same story. They told me to
be ready, and I was. They told me to have a good preseason, and I did.
But my playing time went to nothing. They didn't want me, so I needed to
leave."
But was his time in Detroit really "a nightmare," as he called it this week
before playing his first game in Orlando?
Milicic, 20, found freedom and riches he never could have envisioned as a
kid in war-torn Serbia and Montenegro.
"War is bad, but it's something that is out of your control," he said.
"Basketball is something that you can control, and when it didn't work out
like I had wanted, it became a bad experience. I just want to play
basketball and have fun." The Pistons "didn't give me that chance."
If anything, Darko's problem is that he has become too Americanized.
A concern remains that Milicic lacks motivation to push himself beyond
the fruits already won from being the second pick in the 2003 draft. It's
still easier to blame somebody else for his shortcomings.
Isn't there a local law on the books prohibiting the Magic from engaging
in a business deal with Joe Dumars? Orlando hasn't recovered from the
less-than-minimal return on its seven-year, $98-million investment in
Grant Hill in 2000. The sign-and-trade deal involving Hill gave the
Pistons the backbone of their championship revival -- Ben Wallace.
But some people in Orlando think that vengeance is finally theirs, fleecing
the Pistons of an unrefined talent they ruined solely by neglect.
Sounds like the Magic Kingdom has been sniffing Tinker Bell's pixie dust.
