The former No 1 overall pick in the NBA draft has been ridiculed for years as a bust. This week, in hours of YouTube rants, he set the record straight
Before the NFL’s JaMarcus Russell there was the NBA’s Kwame Brown. Like the former Raiders quarterback, Brown was a top draft pick whose bevy of physical gifts marked him as the kind of transformational player who only comes along once in a generation. But unlike Russell, who was a star in college with LSU first, Brown had that burden placed upon him while still a teenager.
Brown made history as the first NBA player to go No 1 straight out of high school when Michael Jordan’s Washington Wizards came calling in 2001. And if he didn’t go down as a Hall of Fame-bound great in the mold of other straight-from-school players like Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett, well, Brown figured to be at least as brilliant as Jermaine O’Neal or fellow McDonald’s All-American Tyson Chandler. When Brown turned out to be neither of those things, he became easy fodder for “all-time draft busts” clickbait, inspiration for this ur-Stephen A Smith rant, an argument for bringing back the NBA age limit and a punchline for a thousand basketball podcasts – even player-hosted safe-spaces like Showtime’s All The Smoke.
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