Mile Ilic spent only one season in the NBA. Sixteen years later, the part he remembers most isn’t a game. It’s the pills he refused to take.
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The Serbian center, who now hosts the Jao Mile podcast in Serbia, recently looked back on his time with the New Jersey Nets during an appearance on Podcast Inkubator (episode #1480). According to a translation by Basketball Network, Ilic said the team handed players a supplement and that “they give you 20 different pills.”
“There was something there, they gave you some supplement. And they give you 20 different pills. And one pill there is huge, you can’t even break it into three parts to swallow it. I gave up very quickly,” he said. (As translated by Basketball Network)
The Nets picked Ilić 43rd overall in the 2005 draft and signed him in September 2006, after Zoran Planinić’s departure opened a roster spot. The 7-foot-1 center appeared in five games, averaged 1.2 minutes, and never scored.
In February 2007, New Jersey made him the first player it assigned to its D-League affiliate, the Colorado 14ers. That October, the Nets traded him to the New Orleans Hornets with Bernard Robinson for David Wesley, and the Hornets waived both players right away.
Ilic returned to Europe and played professionally for years before turning to podcasting.
Ultimately, Ilic explained that he refused to participate. He did not feel right taking pills in the locker room, but others surely did not share his opinion about it, allegedly.
Mile Ilic on the NBA locker room pills
Speaking on the same episode, he said he saw Jason Kidd, the Nets’ Hall of Fame point guard, take the same set of pills.
“You take so many pills, I don’t even know what it is and I figure they think it’s all normal because I saw Kidd taking that exact same pile of pills too.”
“But something just didn’t sit right with me. Above all, I think they know exactly what needs to be done to get built. Which workout, when to do it, how much to do it,” he further explained. (As translated by Basketball Network)
Kidd is often regarded as one of the best point guards in NBA history, and his arrival in New Jersey changed the franchise. The Nets acquired him from the Phoenix Suns in a 2001 trade for Stephon Marbury. In his first season, they jumped from 26 wins to 52, and Kidd finished second to Tim Duncan in MVP voting. He then led New Jersey to back-to-back NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003, the franchise’s first two Eastern Conference titles.
By the time Ilic arrived in 2006, Kidd was the established leader of that locker room, which is why seeing him follow the same routine might have made such an impression on him.
Ilic, however, did not accuse Kidd of using anything banned. His point was that taking a large pile of pills was treated as normal in the locker room, and if the team’s biggest star was doing it, it was clearly standard practice. What bothered Ilic was not knowing what he was swallowing, and he believed the staff knew far more about building a player’s body than he did.
But this also highlights a real problem that athletes face today. Under sport drug-testing programs, players are held responsible for any banned substance found in a test, no matter how it got into their body. That is why the NBA recommends NSF Certified for Sport, a third-party program that tests supplements for banned substances.
And the Nets have been through something like this before.
In August 2019, the NBA suspended Brooklyn forward Wilson Chandler for 25 games after he tested positive for ipamorelin, a substance that raises growth hormone levels. A few months later, Hawks forward John Collins received a 25-game ban for GHRP-2. He said he had taken a supplement that was contaminated without his knowledge.
The league’s drug program has also changed in other ways since Ilic’s time. In a separate clip from the same podcast, translated by Basketball Network, Ilić said players faced about four drug tests a year back then. In 2023, the NBA removed cannabis from its banned list.
However, nothing described by Mile Ilic proves that anyone broke any rules. It just shows how a 22-year-old rookie reacted to a routine that was never explained to him.