Straight out of high school, drafted third overall by the Clippers in 2000. Signed with Jordan Brand at just 18. Darius Miles’ career started like something every kid dreams about. But sadly, it ended like something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. After nine seasons, a catastrophic knee injury in April 2006 sidelined him through two surgeries, and by 2009 he’d quietly walked away from the NBA and the public eye. Now, after nearly two decades, Miles is finally giving flowers to the people who helped pull him out of that dark space. The ones who broke that curse and reminded him there’s still life.

Selected third overall in 2000, Miles signed a rookie deal reportedly worth $3 million per season with the Clippers. By the time his short NBA career was over, Darius Miles had pulled in around $62 million in total salary. But money wasn’t what broke him. In June 2016, the then-37-year-old filed for bankruptcy, despite career earnings near $62 million. Headlines focused on his bankruptcy, but the real culprit was clinical depression—a torment he’d long battled in silence.

Growing up, Darius Miles had three constants in his life: his grandfather, his grandma, and his mom. That was his world: his whole family under one roof. By 2009, when the knee injury forced him out of the game he loved so much, Miles was already in a dark place. Then life came at him harder. First, his grandfather passed. Then his grandma.

And though he was barely holding it together, he kept going. But in 2013, when his mother lost her battle with cancer, it completely shattered him from the inside. In his own words:  “As I retired, my grandfather passed away, then my grandmother passed away,y then my mama passed away. So these are the three people in the house that I grew up with my whole life…I never thought that was real, like when somebody says they have an anxiety attack or they have anxiety. I’m like man you bullshitting, that ain’t real until I started experiencing it myself.” 

For seven or eight years, Miles cut off every tie to the world. No interviews, no appearances. No friends. Nothing. He vanished. Then, fatherhood pulled him back. As he said, “My kids made me kind of like get out of those seven eight years I was just thinking about, I got to get back out here and do something for my kids to leave my kids something.”  You see, it wasn’t fame, money, or basketball that saved him. It was fatherhood. And sometimes, that’s the only thing strong enough to pull you out of the darkest corners of your mind.

But beyond his children, one former teammate emerged as his lifeline. A friend, a neighbour who came with a ray of hope to Miles’ life when Miles was on the verge of collapsing.

Besides his children, Darious Miles leaned on a former teammate for support

If life ever chose a soul to torment, it was Darious Miles. Basketball was his only way out, a fragile escape from a past where he once stared down the barrel of a gun as a teenager. But even the light he found on the court didn’t last long. Life, relentless and cruel, kept hurling heartbreak his way. One by one, he lost those he loved. And when cancer snatched his mother, the one person who meant everything to him, something inside Darious shattered. He spiraled into darkness, admitting he “pretty much went insane.”

“When she died, I ain’t gonna lie, it broke me,” Miles wrote. “I didn’t leave her house for an entire year.” As if grief wasn’t cruel enough, Miles was also retired, broke, and surrounded by people who still owed him money. “The worst part was that I had people who owed me a lot of money,” Miles later admitted. 

In those darkest nights, when the arena spotlight was long gone and the world felt unbearably heavy, only a handful of people reached out. One of them was his old teammate, Quentin Richardson. The same Quentin who once shared head-knocking celebrations with Miles during their long-gone Clippers days. And Richardson didn’t just pass by, he lifted Miles from the depths.

Richardson and Miles had been inseparable since their rookie days with the Clippers (2000–02), trading three-point barrages and head-knocking celebrations on-court. Years later, when Miles’s mother succumbed to cancer and he “didn’t leave her house for an entire year,” it was Richardson who refused to let him disappear entirely. Through countless phone calls, text messages, and surprise visits, Richardson nudged Miles back into the world, first convincing him to share his story, then inviting him to co-host their now-viral Knuckleheads podcast in February 2019.

“Q-Ball was relentless,” Miles told Kearns Group in 2024. “He kept saying, ‘You gotta tell your truth—people need to hear this.’ Without Quentin, I don’t know if I ever would’ve written that essay or come back at all.”

Darious Miles’ story is a stark reminder that in a world eager to forget its fallen stars. Some bonds like LeBron and Wade, Shaq and Kobe, Miles and Richardson forged on the hardwood, stay long after the final buzzer, and the crowd’s roar fades away.