But I’ll delete it now, since I wasn’t sure about how much I should quote (less than you did) since they require a login.

It’s definitely a very interesting article with the first quotes from Darius, and he clearly isn’t happy about how his situation was handled in Portland and claiming he did work very hard on his comeback.

case in point : These 2 quotes seem to contradict one another

“I’ve been past the rehab stage since June,” Miles said. “I am ready to go, but I just need to get in better shape. It’s about maintaining the strength in my legs and getting my timing. I’m excited and anxious and ready to go and play. I don’t think my leg will ever be 100 percent again, but I feel like I’m 90-95 percent.”

“It was a long two years. I felt I could have played last year, but that wasn’t in the [Blazers’] plans. It was real frustrating. When you’ve been doing something so long, you kind of lose a love for it from not playing, then you go back to having so much love for it.”

(Emphasis is mine)

He says he could have played last year….but rehab didn’t end till June of this year. I call BS!

What a piece of work this guy is.
He came here because Cleveland couldn’t stand him. Never showed any desire to be a winner, was uncoachable, and had zero work ethic (came to practice smelling like booze). Now he comes back and pretends like he was the one who was mistreated. I used to feel kinda bad about wanting him to retire, now I don’t. He’s a jerk.

“They made a decision on the career-ending injury, they made it for the organization, but I felt they didn’t have my best interests at heart. I don’t have to prove anything, because I always knew I had the skills to play at this level. But it did make me hungry and fired up. I really wanted to go to a great situation, if I did get another chance.
* * *
Here, it’s about the championship and bigger goals, instead of about one player.”

I wish we could get to the bottom of the mystery as to how a knee that is so badly damaged as to be declared a career ending injury by the nba, which sounds like no easy task, becomes good enough to play at the highest levels in less than 2 months.

There is some difference of opinion by Miles camp, Grover et al, and the NBA docs as to what is exactly wrong with Darius’ knee. If Darius can come back and play it will really be some egg on the face of the NBA, but if he cannot comeback and further damages his knee then there will be some serious egg of the faces of those who told him his knee was playable.

Does anyone have enough of a medical background to weigh in on the subjectivity of interpreting the xrays and mri scans on a knee? It sounds like someone is way off base here and, for Darius sake, it would be nice to know who.

I’m not a lawyer by any means. But I suppose the whole “long-term injuries / medical retirement procedure” has been designed with a player coming back with his own team in mind. That should prevent a team from labeling a player unfit to play again, get the cap relief, and then play him again later (maybe on a lower contract). Hence the “10 games” provision.
That he would retire and then come back with a different team doesn’t seem to be the focus. After all, who would pick up a truly long-term injured player? If it was, wouldn’t they also have included a second independent medical examination that declares a player healthy again, if there is new evidence of healing progress? Now a different team (in this case Boston) can just say “hey, we think he is fit”, and he is back. Without taking any responsibility for the old contract. That doesn’t seem right.

And finally, there seems to be a possibility to get a player off your salary cap again when his comeback fails for the same injury (the re-application sentence in section 4(h) below). But it’s unclear when the “appropriate time” to apply for this would be. The end of the season? Another year? Since event the comeback from medical retirement hasn’t been tested before, I highly doubt the league has given much thought to this re-retirement.

I could imagine the Blazers will bring this whole issue up at the next meeting of the owners (however a better procedure might look like). Just a feeling. Well, here his the original text from the CBA applying to this situation:

(h) Long-Term Injuries. Any player who suffers a career-ending injury or illness, and whose contract is terminated by the Team in accordance with the NBA waiver procedure, will be excluded from his Team’s Team Salary as follows:

(1) Beginning on the first anniversary of the injury or illness, the Team may apply to the NBA to have the player’s Salary for each remaining Salary Cap Year covered by the Contract excluded from Team Salary.

(2) The determination of whether a player has suffered a career-ending injury or illness shall be made by a physician selected jointly by the NBA and the Players Association.

(3) Notwithstanding Section 4(h)(1) and (2) above, the career-ending injury or illness of a player who plays in more than ten (10) games in any Season shall not be deemed to have occurred prior to the last game in which the player played in such Season.

(4) Notwithstanding Section 4(h)(1) and (2) above, if after a player’s Salary is excluded from Team Salary in accordance with this Section 4(h), the player plays in ten (10) NBA games in any Season, the excluded Salary for the Salary Cap Year covering such Season and each subsequent Salary Cap Year shall thereupon be included in Team Salary (and if the tenth game played is a playoff game, then the excluded Salary shall be included in Salary retroactively as of the start of the Team’s last Regular Season game). After a player’s Salary for one (1) or more Salary Cap Years has been included in Team Salary in accordance with this Section 4(h)(4), the player’s Team shall be permitted at the appropriate time to re-apply to have the player’s Salary (for each Salary Cap Year remaining at the time of the re-application) excluded from Team Salary in accordance with the rules set forth in this Section 4(h).

So the Clippers, the Cavs and the Blazers all got this one wrong? Darius is really just a hardworking guy who loves basketball? Really? How soon they forget.

I still don’t see how this is “black mark on the public perception.” An independent doctor declared his injuries career-ending. Any other team would have done the same thing, and rightfully so.

Important to note that Darius hasn’t come back from anything yet. Other players, Allan Houston comes to mind, have had tryouts with team after having career ending injuries.

This quote really says everything you need to know about Darius:

“because this is my first time playing on a team that wins most of its games. The teams I’ve played on were going to lose most of their games, and we knew this before the season.”

Yes Darius, don’t bother playing unless a winning season is guaranteed. And god forbid you actually try to help a franchise transform from loser to winner.

Can you imagine if Darius played in the NFL.
After his injury he would have been waived and told “Good Luck”.
Instead he’s still getting paid handsomely.

doesn’t make sense. Darius made his bed with his lack of effort, insubordination and stupid antics. If he can recover from this then good for him but I don’t feel bad for him at all. People have good reason to think you are a cancer and worthless because that’s basically all he has shown sans maybe his contract year. Portland was in it’s right mind when they found a way to remove the tumor.

At the end of the day I just think he isn’t too savvy. Not a thug, not a bad man. I just think he isn’t too savvy.

He came into the NBA, as we all know, out of high school. His most celebrated talents have always been his athleticism and his dunking ability. He has never played great defense. He has never had a jumpshot. He can’t even shoot free throws. He has always had his athleticism and dunking. That was enough at the high school level. He couldn’t get into St. John’s (which isn’t hard, trust me, I went there on an academic scholarship with a high school GPA under 3.0 and I shouldn’t have been able to graduate due to truancy, but that’s another story…it was my SAT score that got me the scholarship) so he skipped some valuable learning experience to go straight to the league.

I just think it boils down to the fact that he’s just not that good, and didn’t/doesn’t realize it. Maybe he didn’t work that hard because he didn’t feel he needed to. But it’s pretty obvious he is a pretty one-dimensional player. He relied on his athleticism. That rarely ends well. Because he never improved and had a bad attitude, he acquired a league-wide reputation, which is a reputation I would agree with. But I do not agree with the reputation he has amongst fans, which is that of a “thug.”

I don’t care about the time he has spent at strip clubs, nor do I care about his fight with Maurice Cheeks (yeah, he was wrong, but I still feel it was overblown), nor do I care that he has been known to refuse autographs in his private life. I laugh off anything that is ever said about the personal lives of players anyhow, because whether it is extremely bad or extremely good and thus actually newsworthy, I simply don’t care about the little details and don’t understand the people that do.

He came to practice once smelling of alcohol. He explained why, and I believe him because I’m more inclined to believe the story of the person involved, not the opinion of some random fan who has heard ever shifting versions of the same story over and over again and repeats it differently every time. He had wine when he was out with his wife, she drove him home, he showed up to practice and the alcohol smell was emanating from his body. Not the best move, but I’ll believe him.

I don’t think he is an awful human being, but that doesn’t mean I think he is a saint. This isn’t a world of extremes so to infer that I think he is an excellent role model just because I don’t think he is a thug is dumb.

I think he is hardheaded. I think he is lucky to be getting this chance, and I hope he makes the best of it. I think the “thug” label is undeserved and it annoys me an awful lot to hear it. That is all I think about Darius Miles. I don’t feel bad for him, but the fact that he gets paid either way and prefers to try and continue to play basketball in the NBA tells me he at least enjoys the game. He could probably be making more in Europe, but he isn’t. He could be doing something else, but he isn’t. I don’t know him, and I’m not going to try and pretend like I do, so I don’t assume the best or worst about him.

At the end of the day I wish him the best, and I hope he has grown up a little bit.

that they got mixed up with this patented liar in the first place.

Are you kidding me Darius?

My favorite segment is: “I felt I could have played last year, but that wasn’t in the [Blazers’] plans. It was real frustrating. When you’ve been doing something so long, you kind of lose a love for it from not playing, then you go back to having so much love for it.”

You “kind of lose a love for it”??? Darius, that was your problem, YOU NEVER LOVED THE GAME OF BASKETBALL. We know that because you never respected the game, and you never showed the will to put it as a priority in your life.

I’m just thrilled that you have gotten this latent love for the game, so now you can play the victim role. You can whine and cry and use $100 bills to wipe away your tears.

You were able to use your God-given talent to hoodwink people out of $50 million. And now you can say with a straight face that you think you actually deserved it and were mistreated?

You are a fraud Darius.

…a nice long career of NINE more NBA games. Then he can take his classless, non-work ethic, weed smoking, steroid taking act to Europe.

the Celtics roster. Some Blazer fan you are. Miles had a cocky attitude and thought he could jerk around anyone he wanted to. That changed once Roy and Aldridge took over. Same thing in Cleveland, he became a nobody when Lebron showed up, and they hit the eject button on Darius.

You’re a lame Blazer fan “Ben”.

So if he WERE to get a chance at coming back and playing ten games to put his salary back on our cap,
he’d have to first make the season roster, then sit out the first 10 games to serve that drug suspension,
and so his earliest chance to play ten games would be in Boston’s 11th through 20th games of the season, right?

Well then, check out the Celtics’ schedule:
Game #15: Against Philadelphia.
Think Cheeks wants to see Darius happy after what happened?
And that’s on top of Sixers-Celtics being a decades-old bad-blood rivalry,
with both teams in the mix for being the best in the East.

And then . . .
Game #19: Portland at Philadelphia. On ESPN.
I can hardly wait to hear the national broadcast team announce,
“Now checking into the line-up for Portland . . . Shawn Eckardt and Jeff Gillooly.”

In what would be Miles’ first ten games back (if he makes it that far), he faces Cheeks AND Portland.
Good luck, suckerrrr!

can take to the hoop as hard as Rudy or JB and take the knocks that come with that he belongs in the league but he was lazy=poor defender when he still had his hops and the what if you pay his suspension and he takes a dump? you have wasted you money buying bad karma.

Sophia

come out of this spat smelling like roses, so it’s pointless to take sides.

I am personally disappointed with how he has been treated by the fans and especially the media. If it weren’t for his contract still being on our books, I doubt half the bad things said about him would have been said in the first place.

That we were working with him all day every day to try and help him get healthy and he flat out didn’t show the same effort.

We were paying him big money and expected him to work hard and earn it in whatever capacity possible for him.

I seriously doubt he ever sees any minutes for any team.

Part of me wonders if there is some kind of dubious motive by the Celt’s. If he does play in 10 games then we are fully on the hook for the remainder of contract that he signed with us. That would be a big hit to our cap and we have big time rookie contracts expiring soon. Maybe Boston feels that we are their biggest obstacle to winning another title and want to make it hard to resign BRoy and LMA. Just a thought.

He’s the past. I want to focus on the future, which is much brighter for Miles not being here.

I don’t think Darius was that bad of a guy. He wasn’t a headliner in the “JailBlazer” act, but he did some foolish things. Surrounded by the right folks, I still believed last year that he could get his act together. But if this was a wrong assumption, than he wasn’t a fit on this team. Injured or not, the team very likely wanted to see him go.

So did the Blazers act illegally or unethically in their treatment of Darius?

I don’t think so. In any relationship, what really makes it work is the extra effort given by both parties beyond the bare minimum. I think in this situation, both Darius and the team reduced their efforts to the bare minimum…essentially what they were contractually obligated to do. Contract terms are cold and harsh, not warm and fuzzy. Contract terms don’t mend fences, build bridges or covers each others butt. The contract may be fulfilled, but the relationship is already broken.

A perception of a Black Mark….he doesn’t seem to think that the Blazers actually did anything wrong per se….just that some people will think that they did (and he is right if Timbo’s remarks are any indication).