Former Milwaukee Bucks center Larry Sanders is one of the more complicated players in recent NBA history. The No. 15 pick in the 2010 draft impressed in his first few seasons as an elite interior defender and seemed primed to become a perennial All-Defensive Team contender when he signed a four-year, $44-million contract extension in the summer of 2013.
Then his career went terribly askew. Sanders tore a ligament in his thumb during a nightclub fight a few weeks into the 2013-14 season, was revealed shortly thereafter to have been cited twice for leaving dogs out in the freezing cold, suffered a season-ending broken orbital bone in February 2014, and refused to apologize when he received a five-game suspension for marijuana use that April. He left the Bucks and the NBA in January 2015 and hasn’t hooked up with another team, although he made vague gestures towards possible deals on social media this summer.
A new feature by Mike Piellucci of Vice Sports brings some insight into Sanders’ post-NBA life and the reasons he left the league. As Sanders puts it, he began to become disenchanted with life in professional basketball when it began to take over too much of his life. He also began not to trust the people meant to take care of him, especially during what he characterizes as an act of severe negligence by the Bucks:
At first he smoked [marijuana] to ward off the encroaching waves of anxiety. Then, three months after the nightclub fight, he fractured his orbital bone in a February 2014 game against the Houston Rockets. He chose not to take his doctor-prescribed painkillers, worrying that the pills could be addictive. Sanders is hardly the only athlete to endorse that line of thought, but the impetus had as much to do with his surroundings as his own research. He knew, after the brawl and the resulting injury, that the Bucks were scrutinizing their investment more than ever. Sanders believed they were more concerned with his being on the floor to justify his new contract than his overall well-being. He still believes he may have been concussed, but the team never tested him.
“They kind of let me go to sleep on the training table and sent me home and didn’t really think anything was wrong,” he said. “And then, the next day, I find out I blew out the orbital in my face. That kind of went into the box of why I had to get out of here, just for your health. I didn’t really feel safe with them—the league or Milwaukee—after that point.”
This is a pretty serious accusation. The NBA instituted its first concussion policy during the 2011-12 season, so Sanders’s injury certainly should have required further testing by the rules. If this did in fact happen, the Bucks would be subject to punishment from the league at minimum.
We reached out to a Bucks spokesman, who declined to comment on the story.
With no clear answer to this story in sight, we’re left with little to do but address Sanders’s more general issues with life in the NBA. Frankly, it’s hard to argue that he did the wrong thing in accepting a buyout and walking away from the sport that made him a very rich man. Piellucci paints a portrait of Sanders as a complicated man with many interests that were at odds with his life in the NBA — art, music, and being around as often as possible for his two young children. He appears to have reconnected with those loves in the past two years and seems happier for it.
There’s also the issue of mental health, which Sanders touched on in April 2014 when he explained his decision to leave the Bucks. He disappeared from the team in part to enter into treatment specializing in anxiety, depression, and mood disorders, and it became very clear to him that succeeding in the NBA was not good for his short-term or long-term mental health. The intense commitment to craft and improvement that we admire in many athletes were intensely problematic for Sanders. As such, he only wants to return to the NBA now if it makes sense for him, not just his employer.
At the same time, Sanders does not claim that he fell out of love with basketball. Piellucci observes him playing with friends, shooting the long jumpers and taking defenders off the dribble in a way he would never be allowed to do (or, let’s be honest, succeed at) as an NBA rim protector. The talent is still there, and it’s very believable that Sanders — still just 27 years old — could join a contending roster now and contribute valuable defense.
However, the fact that he’s able to help doesn’t mean that he has to. There’s a tendency in sports to assume that all athletes would do anything for a contract or chance to play at the highest level. When someone doesn’t fit that mold, he tends to confuse and anger teams and fans alike. Sanders and the Bucks had very different priorities, and it sadly took a great deal of controversy and animosity for them to recognize it. Nevertheless, the end result seems to have been for the best.
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