It’s not a controversial take that former NBA forward Michael Beasley underperformed at the highest level.
Beasley was selected with the No. 2 overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft by the Miami Heat after he averaged 26.2 points and 12.4 rebounds per game in one season of college basketball at Kansas State University, yet he didn’t so much as even earn an All-Star appearance in the league.
Beasley said recently that if he could redo his career, he would have listened to longtime Heat team president Pat Riley.
“If I had did it all over again, I would have listened to Pat Riley,” Beasley said. “Pat Riley told me to get a condo, get two bedrooms, one for my mom when she come in town, and everybody else figure it out. I went the polar opposite. And my excuse to him was like, ‘Yo, I grew up in an apartment. I need some space.’ So, I got a six-bedroom house, got three dogs, had three, four of my n—– staying in. And then from — that’s where all the problems came from. And it made sense to me, ’cause it’s — these is real life problems.
“I was bailing people out of jail. I was getting lawyers. My uncle was fighting a RICO. My godfather was — they all got nine, 10 years.”
Beasley wasn’t able to score the ball at the clip that he did in college in the NBA. He averaged 12.4 points per game for his NBA career and never scored more than 19.2 in any one of his 11 seasons.
He’s also been out of the NBA for a while now despite the fact that he’s 36 years old and there are plenty of active players in the league older than him. He hasn’t played in the best basketball league in the world since he suited up in 26 games with the Los Angeles Lakers back in the 2018-19 regular season.
What made the Heat’s decision to draft Beasley a particularly big whiff is that two great former University of California, Los Angeles stars were drafted almost immediately after him. Nine-time All-Star Russell Westbrook was selected with the No. 4 pick, while big man Kevin Love was drafted by the Memphis Grizzlies at the No. 5 spot.
If the Heat had drafted one of Love or Westbrook instead of Beasley, it seems within the realm of possibility that Miami would have enjoyed even more success during the Big 3 era in the early 2010s.
But Beasley deserves praise for admitting that he made mistakes over the course of his pro career, as that’s something not everyone is brave enough to do.
While it’s unfortunate that he never lived up to his potential as an NBA player, the fact that he stuck around in the league for more than 10 seasons is an accomplishment in of itself, and he was still a solid player in the league for a long time.
