Although Kwame Brown is the top pick in the parallel, he also left his own record in the NBA

On July 1, June 26, 2003, at the draft at Madison Square Garden, New York, when David Stern read out that "The Washington Wizards chose Kwame Brown from Green College High School", NBA history was permanently rewritten - this 2.11-meter-tall Georgia teenager became the league's first high school No. 1 pick. This controversial label is not only the starting point of Brown's career, but also a footnote that he can never get rid of.

Before Brown, high school players such as Moses Malone and Kevin Garnett have achieved brilliant achievements in the NBA, but no team dared to use the No. 1 pick to bet on a bet that has not been tempered by the NCAA. Michael Jordan, then president of Wizards' basketball operations, made this decision despite opposition. He took Brown's dominant performance in the high school league averaged 20.1 points, 13.3 rebounds and 5.8 blocks, as well as a talent template known as the "combination of Duncan and Garnett". At that time, the Sports Illustrated Special feature compared Brown to a "young version of O'Neal who can jump shots", and this unrealistic expectation laid the groundwork for the later tragedy.

Brown's NBA debut was like a microcosm of his career. In the game against the Knicks on October 30, 2001, he played for 7 minutes on the bench, with all data except one mistake being zero. Throughout the rookie season, he averaged only 4.5 points and 3.5 rebounds per game, shooting 38.7% from the field, and ranked last among all No. 1 picks in the 21st century in three statistics. What's even more fatal is that during Jordan's return to serve as a Wizards after retirement, his strict demands on this little brother turned into public humiliation. In the intervals of a game in November 2002, the live camera captured Jordan roaring at Brown: "Softie! You're the one who's X's is the ball!" This video was repeatedly played on ESPN, completely destroying the confidence of the 19-year-old boy. The

turned out to be in the 2005 transfer to the Lakers. In his autobiography "The Last Season", Phil Jackson revealed that Brown had collapsed and cried in the locker room due to psychological pressure: "He told me that everyone is waiting to see me fail," and this fear has swallowed his game instinct. " Despite this, Brown still won the championship with the Lakers in 2008. Although he played for only 23 minutes in the playoffs, he became the first high school No. 1 pick to win the ring. This ironic achievement is precisely the precise metaphor of Brown's career - he always struggles in the gap between proving himself and questioning.

The data will not lie: Brown has been in 12 years of career and has averaged 6.6 points and 5.5 rebounds per game, forming a tragic contrast with the same class, Paul Gasol (17 points and 9.2 rebounds). But what is easy to overlook is that he maintains the longest career record for the No. 1 pick in high school (12 seasons) and leaves a flash moment on the defensive end. In the game against the Nuggets in December 2006, he sent seven blocks in a career record; during the Pistons in the 2007-08 season, his defensive plus-negative value (+2.3) ranked among the top 10 power forwards in the league. These fragments piece together a tragic genius who was swept up by the torrent of the times - he might have become an excellent blue-collar insider, but the possibility was crushed by the title of "No. 1 pick".

History is always full of drama. After Brown, LeBron James of the 2003 class and Dwight Howard of the 2004 class were elected as high school students and were greatly successful, which actually made Brown's case more research-oriented. Basketball analyst Hollinger pointed out: "What Kwame proves is not that high school students cannot be the top scorer, but that psychological assessment is more important than athletic talent. "In 2017, Brown published a long article in the Players Forum, frankly admitted that "I did not meet expectations, but I tried my best every day." This kind of reconciliation may be more respectable than the historical record he sets.

When we pull the camera away, we will find that Brown's dilemma is essentially a microcosm of the flaws in the NBA draft mechanism. After him, the league issued the "must be over 19 years old and have one year of high school" election regulations in 2006, indirectly admitting how dangerous the risk was. Looking back at the 2001 draft reorder, Brown's pick will fall to the end of the first round, but history will only remember: in that conservative era, a young man pushed open the door in the form of a pioneer, although the world behind the door was much crueler than he thought.