Former No. 1 overall pick Kwame Brown reflected on his career during an interview with Doug Gottlieb on Wednesday and shared many thoughts. One of the most notable comments from Brown was about his former coach, Doug Collins.
Collins was the coach of the Wizards during Brown’s rookie season, and the team went 37-45 under him in both of his years as head coach. Brown said if he could do it all over again, he would have asked to be traded because he didn’t like Collins as a coach.
“If Grant Hill don’t like you, then something is wrong,” Brown told Gottlieb on FOX Sports Radio, regarding Collins. “Grant Hill is one of the greatest guys in the world. I think everybody that plays for him says all the right things.
“Doug is a very important guy in basketball and he has a great basketball mind, don’t get me wrong. But the mind games that he plays, you’ll be in the same room, he’s talking about you and trying to get another guy to go against you. [If you’re] 19, 24, 35, nobody wants to be played with. This is our livelihood that this guy plays with, he’s just a micromanager and he’s just not a very good coach when it comes to that aspect. If you want him to draw up a play, X’s and 0’s, and is he a basketball mind? Sure. But does he relate to his players, that’s coming from the African American community? Absolutely not. And it’s not going to affect me to say that now, but if you can ask some of those players and they’ll speak from the heart and they’ll be honest. I’ll tell you what, go grab Etan Thomas and he’ll definitely tell you.”
Brown was the No. 1 pick by the Wizards in the 2001 draft. The word was that Michael Jordan was so impressed with him after a workout that he wanted him badly. That turned out to be a bad pick because Brown amounted to little more than a rotation player, while players like Tyson Chandler and Pau Gasol picked after him became impact players.
Brown seems to be bothered that he is still defined by MJ picking him. He was asked by Gottlieb how he would characterize his career.
“I would characterize it as a bunch of people putting labels on somebody who never asked for those labels. All I did was pursue my dream and I reached a goal that most kids from the inner city only dream about. I persevered through homeless shelters and doing anything I can to get there, only to be labeled as Michael Jordan’s pick. And that’s the whole thing that follows me. The reason why they say I can’t play basketball is all based on this pick and who picked me. I’ve been on several different teams. People go away – I was down in Charlotte, when I was healthy, [I had a] double-double in 2 quarters and no reporter reported on it, nobody said anything. But then I go to the Lakers, I need shoulder surgery and I need ankle surgery, and I go out there and I can’t dunk a basketball and it’s all over YouTube. It’s interesting. I’ve always kept the personality that if Mitch Kupchak brings me into the room and says, ‘Hey, look we’ll pay you $8 million all you need to do is play defense.’ You better damn well understand that I’m going to play defense and I’ve never been a guy who cared about numbers, so I went out there on one leg and one shoulder and I did my job.”
Brown does have a point. If he were a late first-round pick, nobody would have called him a disappointment. But the pick was made outside his control, and relative to that he under-performed.
As for Collins, he’s had four stints as an NBA head coach, all with Eastern Conference teams, and none lasting more than three seasons. He has a .521 winning percentage in the regular season and .411 winning percentage in the postseason.
Here’s audio of the interview:
