Michael Jordan should have paid more attention to the Culligan City of Palms Classic.
If he had, he may have avoided the most ignominious mistake of his non-playing career.
For a brief time in 2000 and 2001, Jordan was president of basketball operations and general manager of the Washington Wizards, tasked with making player personnel decisions. He would leave that capacity in the fall of 2001 to make another comeback as a player, this time not in familiar Chicago Bulls red-and-black but in a Wizards uniform. In so doing, he consigned himself to play with a subpar cast of teammates he picked himself.
One of those teammates was Kwame Brown, a man of many firsts. Jordan chose him first overall in the 2001 NBA draft, making him the first high schooler to become the No. 1 overall draft choice, and also the first City of Palms alumnus to sit atop the draft board.
Brown is also the first name to come up in an argument against Jordan’s skills as an executive. He never lived up to his draft position, averaging 6.6 points and 5.5 rebounds per game in 12 NBA seasons with seven different teams, ultimately compiling the resume of a late first-rounder, at best.
Jordan and then-Wizards coach Doug Collins seemed to indicate that Brown’s predraft workouts for the team persuaded them to the faulty notion that he should be the No. 1 pick. Collins told USA Today’s David DuPree in the immediate wake of the draft that, “… (A)fter we had him in here Monday for his second workout, he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I promise if you draft me, you’ll never regret it.'”
Consider that a promise broken.
A story written in 2015 by ESPN’s Jonathan Abrams indicates Brown said the same thing to Jordan. Ultimately, the final call was Jordan’s to make, and his decision leads to the question of whether Jordan ever saw what happened to Brown in the first round of the 2000 City of Palms Classic. Brown and his Glynn Academy (Brunswick, Georgia) team were bottled up by Dillard (Fort Lauderdale), which won 65-52 and held Brown to 18 points and six rebounds, paltry numbers for someone who would be playing against NBA competition months later.
He wasn’t even the best Brown on the floor that day — that distinction belonged to Dillard’s Kelvin Brown, who had 23 points and 10 rebounds en route to a vagabond college career that included stops at South Florida, Fort Scott Community College and Murray State.
Kwame Brown bounced back in the losers bracket the next day, popping off for 30 points and 17 rebounds, a more typical performance that season for the soon-to-be pro. While it’s difficult to put too much stock in a single performance, it’s worth wondering how much weight, if any, Jordan gave to Brown’s off night in Fort Myers.
After all, no one had ever drafted anyone straight out of high school at No. 1 overall before, and a single red flag in America’s top high school tournament may have been enough to convince other executives to go with someone else instead — perhaps eventual No. 2 overall pick Tyson Chandler, also a City of Palms alum, or Pau Gasol, who wound up going No. 3.
Both had much better NBA careers than Brown did, though both carried risk — Chandler, too, came straight out of high school, and Gasol would have been the first international No. 1 pick if the Wizards had taken him. Still, warning signs that the City of Palms exposed went unheeded, and for that, Jordan paid a heavy price.