NBA Draft Bust Week: Michael Olowokandi can’t perform a miracle or two

Michael Olowokandi played for three NBA franchises over a span of nine NBA seasons that included minutes logged in 500 regular-season games — and I can’t stress this enough — he was a number one pick who averaged a pedestrian 8.3 points per game and 6.8 rebounds. He is either a largely unknown figure or a bust. Perhaps his status as the latter is in due part because he was always the former. Maybe that’s fair, but maybe it’s not quite right either.

The Los Angeles Clippers chose Olowokandi with the number one overall pick in 1998. The Clippers, whether playing their home games in Los Angeles or San Diego, had never been a franchise favored by fortune, and Olowokandi was, at the time, only the franchise’s second number one pick ever, which is also why the pick turned out to be so costly. These kinds of opportunities are, after all, almost as rare for franchises as they are for individual players. The desperation from fanbases and front offices can warp the realities of a situation. Players can appear better or worse when viewed from a peculiar distance or under a particular light, and the pressure a player feels can render improvement, at least on the scale that’s expected, nearly impossible. Talent alone is not enough. Demeanor and work ethic matter, as does health.

In 1988, the Clippers drafted Danny Manning with the number one pick. Manning entered the league with a championship pedigree. He also hailed from a blue blood program, having won that championship at the University of Kansas during the tenure of Larry Brown, a coach whose career branched from the Dean Smith coaching tree. Dean Smith’s basketball roots were in Kansas too, so this was all rather incestuous in a royal way. The future was bright. The Clippers were tapping the right chronologies, but Manning’s limbs, specifically his knees, couldn’t support the weight of all that blue sky. There were limits, and despite being an All-Star, he couldn’t reset the franchise. He became further proof of a Clipper curse; a warning to constellate with Bill Walton.

Nine NBA players would be drafted number one between Danny Manning and Michael Olowokandi. Of those nine, only two — Pervis Ellison and Joe Smith — never made an All-Star team. But even Joe Smith would be a 15.3-points-per-game difference-maker worth breaking the rules over. Derrick Coleman, Larry Johnson, Chris Webber, and Glenn Robinson would all play at All-Star levels, and Webber especially would prove capable of shouldering a franchise. Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and Tim Duncan would also all be chosen number one in those years leading up to the Clippers anointing Olowokandi their cornerstone. And so the prologue to the 1998 draft could be written: the Clippers may be the Clippers, but the right pick in this decade can turn almost any ship around.

But the Clippers chose poorly.

Selected directly after Olowokandi in the same draft were Mike Bibby, Raef LaFrentz, Antawn Jamison, and Vince Carter. Any of those picks, especially Bibby, Jamison, or Carter, would have been better. Keep scrolling down the list of draftees from that year and one is bound to notice Dirk Nowitzki and Paul Pierce, as well as flashes in the pan like Jason Williams, Bonzi Wells, Rashard Lewis, and Al Harrington and a plethora of other contributors whose careers turned in more signature contributions than Olowokandi’s.

But this is all hindsight too. For example, Dirk Nowitzki only looks like a better pick now that we have seen him win and fade away. In the spring of 1998, he was all blank space and Don Nelson’s inklings, but players like Bibby and Jamison and Carter were not. They were All-Americans and Final Four contestants. They were, after years in the limelight, overly scrutinized.

Olowokandi was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and he was full of raw, untapped potential. He played college ball at Pacific University. In what sounds like apocryphal, he chose the school at random out of a college guidebook. He was not picked to play. He chose to walk on. By his junior year the team was good enough to play in the 1997 NCAA Tournament. His senior year they would not make it back to the Madness, but they would win the NIT Tournament. While he averaged 22.2 points per game, 11.2 rebounds, and 2.9 blocks that last year as a Pacific Tiger, he wasn’t exactly building the same small college resume of a Steph Curry at Davidson or even Damian Lillard at Weber State. When it came time for naming All-Americans his senior year, Olowokandi was listed as an Honorable Mention, but so were about 35 other players. Perhaps it was their good fortune that their names would be called after his.

But, once again, the question persists: why pick Olowokandi first and not anyone else from that year’s draft class?

He stood tall at 7-feet. He also possessed a solid frame at 270 pounds. He could run the floor well, and his college highlight reels feature a lot of dunks, drop steps, and jump hooks. A scout could fall in love with him at a glance, but many of those dunks occurred while no one was guarding him. The drop steps created space against undersized and overmatched defenders. The dominance was an illusion. Maybe the Clippers knew this, and yet they still handed his name to David Stern nonetheless.

The great irony to Olowokandi’s being picked first is that he arrived late in life to the world of organized basketball. Prior to playing for Pacific University he had only played on a recreational level. However, even that tardiness could be viewed with optimism: if this is what he is after only a few years of basketball, imagine what he could be given more time and the right coaching.

Olowokandi’s timetable was not unique. Tim Duncan was drafted the year before Olowokandi, and like Olowokandi, he too arrived late to the game of basketball. Born in the Virgin Islands, Duncan dreamed of being an Olympic swimmer, and he was in that lane until a hurricane wrecked the swimming pool and he refused to swim in the ocean. He’s been hugging basketballs as a way of avoiding sharks ever since.

A huge difference, however, between Olowokandi and Duncan is that Duncan faced four years of ACC-talent before entering the NBA. This is not to say a smaller school in a less powerful conference cannot produce top NBA talent, but the Clippers looked at Olowokandi and imagined his story could take the same shape as the previous year’s draft pick.

The first time these players met on the basketball court was in April of 1999. The game was not close and meant very little in terms of the standings. The Spurs were good; the Clippers were not. After the game, Jim Brewer, a Clippers assistant at the time and former NBA center, would say of the two big men: “Tim has always been a scoring type of center who has played that role all the way up [to the NBA]. Michael doesn’t have as much experience . . . . In a few more years maybe it would be fair to compare them once Michael has more experience. Now, it is too soon to tell.”

Brewer made it sound as if Duncan had been in the league for years, but Duncan was only a second-year player and, more importantly, Olowokandi, the man with so little basketball experience, was, and still is, one year and twenty-two days older than Tim Duncan, the top overall pick who preceded him.

The careers of these two players are not worth comparing beyond that one head-to-head matchup. After that season, their careers would never be closer. Duncan’s San Antonio Spurs would win the championship at the end of that season, and they would win four more before he retired nearly two decades later. Olowokandi, on the other hand, would play in only one postseason. He would never catch up with Duncan. He was already older and much closer to his ceiling.

The word bust is always cruel. Players do not choose the draft order. General managers, coaches, scouts, and owners are responsible for all that, and if a player refuses to play for a specific franchise, then the player risks looking entitled and becoming a pariah. The Los Angeles Clippers drafted Michael Olowokandi as a future building block in large part because they did not know how else to build than to draft the closest player on the board to a traditional big man. In doing so, they found a way to demonstrate imagination and a lack of creativity at the same time.

After years of owner Donald Sterling’s despicable everything and general manager Elgin Baylor’s constant ineptitude, the Clippers were in no position to draft anyone with the number one pick in 1998. And yet no matter whom they drafted that player would have most likely had to bear the brunt of the franchise’s criticism.

Perhaps the best tangible result of Olowokandi’s career was how being nicknamed the Kandi Man invited NBA fans to craft limited highlight reels, photoshops, and animation with the song “The Candy Man” from 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory playing in the background. That song begins with a question:

Who can take a sunrise
Sprinkle it in dew
Cover it in chocolate and a miracle or two?

This same question is asked of every draft pick. Some answer the question better than others, but some are never given a sunrise in the first place. Instead, they start their careers in a cesspool of Donald Sterling’s making, and when given such a monumental task as turning turds into chocolate, they are likely to put in as little effort as Michael Olowokandi is as accused of doing.