A pass-first center with a passion for hunting titles on the court and game on his ranch, No. 52 facilitated Sacramento’s offense and livened up the locker room.
In the early hours of July 1, 2003, the first day NBA free agents were permitted to negotiate with interested teams, Brad Miller had plans to meet a dozen friends from high school on a houseboat, on a lake in the middle of nowhere.
The self-described country boy — born in Fort Wayne, Ind., raised in Kendallville and a product of Purdue — expected to spend the rest of his career with his hometown Pacers, and locking up a lengthy contract seemed inevitable. But as the days passed and no offer came from Indiana, his agent began phoning other teams and the sought-after center begrudgingly delayed his trip.
The Jazz made a strong pitch, and for a short time, the Nuggets, rebuilding around talented rookie Carmelo Anthony, were the front-runners to lock up his services. But a last-minute offer from Sacramento, and with it, an opportunity to compete for a title and to pair his underutilized skill set with one of the most innovative offenses in the league, changed his mind.
“I remember my agent got mad at me,” Miller recalled. “I was basically going to go to Denver; that’s where I wanted to go at first. But my agent was like, ‘Just give me a day.’ […] Then, it was literally on the third day, where I’m like, ‘I’m ready to make a decision,’ Sac just came in [with an offer].
“Playing against the Kings, I knew their system was going to be pretty great for how I like to play. I felt really good about our chances to go out there and win some games. I was like, ‘Oh, that could be a championship next season.’”
With his long-term basketball future finally determined, there was still a more pressing, immediate matter at hand for the avid outdoorsman: joining his friends on the water. So Miller, to the amusement of his agent and Kings brass, asked if he could postpone the physical that would complete a sign-and-trade from Indiana to Sacramento so he could unwind, swim and fish somewhere in the countryside. Eventually, he agreed to fly to the Pacific Coast, on the condition that he could depart to the Southeast the moment the transaction was finalized.
“My friends talked me out of making the houseboat trip [before the trade was done],” Miller said. “I was like, ‘All right, it’ll still be there.’”
Come September, the do-it-all big man wouldn’t break a sweat fitting in with his Kings teammates, but acclimating to the Greater Sacramento climate, with temperatures rising into triple-digits in the summer, wouldn’t be as easy.
On his first visit to look at prospective houses, Miller became so queasy in the sweltering heat, that he threw up inside one of the residences.
“It was like 105, 110 [degrees]. We were getting in the car with AC, then we’d drive around, shut it off and go in a house that might not have AC,” he said. “I’m like, Holy crap, I’m starting to die.’ I’ve never been good in dry heat, so it took me a couple of years to get used to it.”
Filling in for the injured Chris Webber was, by contrast, a breeze.
Miller wasn’t as nimble or athletic — he jokes his size 16s barely left the floor when he elevated — but his mind was quicker than his feet, and he had a patience to his game that predicated on standstill jumpers from the midrange, gritty defense and screen-setting to free up teammates.
He passed with unselfishness in his final season with the Pacers, averaging a then-career-best 2.6 assists, and would far more often dazzle with a dime – on target, on point and on time – than a ferocious dunk.
Still, no one, including Kings personnel, expected No. 52 to replicate the exceptional passing of Webber, arguably the best playmaking forward in the league, from the elbow and high post. Miller’s 4.3 assists per game in his first year with the Kings ranked second among all centers, trailing only teammate Vlade Divac.
“[Miller] has dimensions to his game that I’m not sure we even knew about,” Kings head coach Rick Adelman told the L.A. Times in 2004. “He’s an outstanding passer, but he’s also a smart enough player to pick up the ways his passing is going to be the most useful to our offense. He’s the reason we haven’t had to change anything while Chris has been out.”
Although he was initially skeptical about Miller’s place in the offense, Doug Christie admits, those concerns were put to rest early in training camp. From Day 1, it became clear that Sacramento’s free-flowing offense wouldn’t suffer and its exemplary ball movement wouldn’t stagnate, as Miller whipped the ball to cutters under the hoop and tossed no-look passes as if he’d played with his new teammates for a half-decade.
“To be honest, at first, I wasn't really sure how it was going to mix,” Christie said. “Then we hit the floor and I was like, ‘Oh, that makes sense!’ He was a perfect, perfect fit. It was so seamless because he had all the skills: nice jumpshot, he could put [the ball on the floor] once or twice, and [could make] all the passes. He was reading [defenses] and his timing was impeccable.”
Miller’s fundamentally sound, all-encompassing game and playmaking chops trace back to his high school days, when he was a 5-foot-11 freshman point guard bringing the ball up court and initiating the offense. He sprouted 12 inches over the next three years, but even as coaches moved him into the paint, Miller prioritized involving others over attacking one-on-one.
“Everyone always got mad at me, saying I need to shoot the ball more often, but I didn't ever care about being the leading scorer; it didn’t matter to me,” he said. “I always got along with the good [shooting] guard who was always eager to score a lot of buckets. I was like, ‘We’ll get along because I’ll get you open.’”
As a junior at Purdue, Miller became the first center in school history to lead the team in assists, and paced the Boilermakers in points, rebounds and blocks in his senior year. But NBA scouts questioned if he had a pro-ready skill set and mislabeled him as a slow-footed, back-to-the-basket center in a league where such players were becoming more obsolete.
Miller didn’t expect to hear his name among the early picks in the Draft, but to this day remains incredulous that every team overlooked him.
“I don’t know [what happened],” he said. “Philadelphia promised they were going to take me 12 picks into the second round … The next day, I went down to Purdue to clean out my s—, and my agent paged me about 30 times before I called him back. He’s like, ‘Where do you want to go?’ I’m like, ‘Who the f— didn’t have a second-round pick? Let’s start with that.’ Because anyone who had a second-round pick but didn’t pick me, I was crossing them off my list basically.”
Miller agreed to a training-camp invite from Charlotte, but because of the impending NBA lockout, his career took a three-month detour to Italy, where he landed with Basket Livorno, then a second-division basketball club. To call his overseas experience miserable would be putting it kindly, Miller says.
The team traveled via tour bus on trips as long as seven hours each way, without a working restroom, and meat he purchased on street markets outside of his apartment twice gave him food poisoning. In Miller’s first game in Sicily, the opposing center flopped on every defensive possession, so Miller was whistled for five offensive fouls plus a technical.
Three months later, the NBA work stoppage ended, and Miller spurned a more lucrative, rest-of-season contract from Livorno to bet on himself with a non-guaranteed deal from the Hornets.
After a slow start, his numbers and his confidence skyrocketed; in his 13th game, Miller pulled down a double-double in 22 minutes, and three weeks later, scored 25 points in only 18 minutes on the floor. In the regular-season finale, with most of the usual starters resting in the second half, the forceful big man with a soft touch exploded for 32 points, 13 rebounds and four assists.
“Once I actually made a shot in the league – Alonzo Mourning blocked like my first five shots – it was like ‘Oh, I know I can play against these guys,’” Miller said. “I was in game-shape too, once I got there, because I’d been actually playing. Some of these guys were just running down and back, and I was lapping them … And then the last game in the year, it ended going to double-overtime. Me and Ricky Davis each scored 32 in the game, we won, and that confidence really took off from there.”
When the Bulls, rebuilding after fully disassembling their championship core, presented him with a starting job, Miller bolted for the Windy City. Along with scoring and rebounding, he brought energy, size and toughness to Chicago’s frontline, refusing to give up easy layups or back down from anyone; not even the biggest big man in the league.
In January 2002, Miller, in tandem with Charles Oakely, committed a hard foul on Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal, who retaliated with two roundhouse punches that barely, and quite fortunately, missed Miller’s head.
“Shaq can’t shoot free throws, but he can dunk it [at a] 90-percent rate, so I just fouled him all the time,” Miller said. “I don’t know how, but I just slightly turned my head to the right, and that big haymaker just nicked the back of my left ear a little bit.”
A few years down the road, the pair joked about the incident as All-Star Game teammates. By then, Miller, in his first season with the Kings, was entrenched as one of the top all-around centers in the league, with averages of 14.1 points, 10.3 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 1.2 blocks – all career-highs.
If those numbers look modest in comparison to O’Neal’s, for instance, that’s because with Miller, it was never about the numbers. Some of his favorite plays, in fact, didn’t register in the box score at all.
“I just wanted to do all the dirty work, get a little bit of everything and make everyone better,” he said. “Get a couple of blocks, maybe get a steal, get a bunch of assists, set a bunch of picks and get a bunch of hockey assists, too. I loved getting those that don’t count in basketball; that quick pass to the next pass to get to the guy [who scored].”
That was why the unorthodox center, content to zip the ball until defensive rotations couldn’t keep up and shoot only when no passing opportunity occured, was tailor-made for the Kings. And why the Kings, with so much offensive balance, were precisely the right team for him.
With a mastery of the X's and O's and split-second improvisation, Miller, time and again, delivered exactly what Sacramento needed. When Minnesota played in drop coverage and left him open from 18 to 20 feet, he pick-and-popped to a then-career-high 35 points on 20 shots. When he recognized Peja Stojakovic or Mike Bibby had clean looks, few players were better at keeping defenses off balance with chest, bounce, behind-the-back or one-hand lob passes.
“Instead of saying, ‘I need to score' or ‘I need to do this,’ it wasn’t ‘I’ – it was, ‘What did we need as a team?’” Christie said. “Brad was just like, ‘Ok, tonight it’s passing. Next night it’s scoring. Tonight it’s defense … He was one of those invaluable types of dudes who I don’t even think probably gets enough credit for who he was for us.”
Miller’s two triple-doubles in 2003-04 were tied for the third-most in the league, and he had no idea he missed three more by either a single rebound or assist.
“That's pretty cool, but that didn’t make me happy,” Miller said. “Winning made me happy.”
Miller had plenty of reasons to celebrate with the Kings, who won 105 games in his first two seasons and reached the playoffs in four of his five full years. And despite sacrificing his personal stats for the good of the team, he’s one of three players in the Sacramento era to compile over 5,000 points, 3,000 rebounds, and 1,500 assists.
But outside of the thrill he’d get from distributing the ball, one of his most memorable moments, he says, came during a regular-season game in Orlando, in which the heavily-favored Kings were sluggish throughout most of the first half.
“We were kind of messing around when we were supposed to beat the piss out of them,” Miller recalled. “I dived for the ball, right before the half – just totally, fully extended – and that set the tone. Then we came out and I think we did beat the piss out of them in the second half.”
As often as he lifted the team on the floor, Miller just as frequently livened up a locker room that appreciated a good-natured needling or practical joke. In the summer of 2007, he grew his hair down to nearly his shoulders, and to the delight of his teammates, offered to wear cornrows throughout preseason. Despite being ridiculed in the press and even receiving hate mail, the insouciant big man has no regrets.
“My teammates who know me, they knew it was going to be funny as s—,” he said. “That’s all I care about. I got like 10 grand – maybe a little bit more – from my teammates to do it. […] My main goal was to make them laugh and get a kick out of it. Plus I got some money. I told other people, ‘You wouldn’t do something like that for a month for 10 grand in cash?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, I would’ve done it, too.’ I’m like, ‘Exactly!’”
A few of those teammates, the more daring ones, also trudged along with Miller from the court to the wilderness. In the offseason and on occasional off days, the Indiana native spent most of his mornings and afternoons big-game hunting in the fields or snagging bass and blue gail from a lake.
He bonded with Darius Songalia in pursuit of turkeys in the heart of Texas and deer in Lithuania. Greg Ostertag gifted Miller a bow and arrow set and introduced him to the owners of a San Antonio-based ranch that he’s returned to every year since. Christie and the late Kobe Bryant expressed interest in accompanying Miller on hunting excursions, but their schedules never aligned.
Recently, Miller invited former Kings forward Quincy Acy on a duck-hunting expedition, and brought elk steaks for DeMarcus Cousins, a fellow game-meat enthusiast, to stock in his freezer.
Miller learned the ins and outs of hunting and fishing at an early age from Dewey Forbes, his match through the Big Brothers-Big Sisters program in 1985. Forbes soon became a father figure and positive role model for Miller, and nearly four decades later, their bond remains strong.
Soon after making the NBA, Miller purchased his first hunting property, an 86-acre farm outside of Kendallville, and now manages over 1,400 acres of land across Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio.
In the mid-2000s, he began recording his cross-country exploits on go-pro cameras, such as the time he and his film crew slid down a steep cliff while trailing a black-tailed deer or when Miller came within 10 feet of a “monster moose” in a remote Alaskan forest.
“That was pretty intense,” he said. “I [fired at him] with my bow and arrow and ran off. We waited and we thought he was dead. I’m about 30, 40 yards away … and this joker puts his head up and stands up! I’m dropping my camera, trying to get [to safety]. I'm in the middle of Alaska, lost! Two minutes later, [my friends] popped out and found me.”
As his NBA days wound down, Miller launched his own TV series, “Country Boys Outdoors,” on the Sportsman Channel, and since retiring from basketball in 2012, he’s turned his leisure hunting habit into a full-time second career. The Sacramento resident devotes his schedule to traveling the world and tracking different animals in different locations, and is the proud recipient of a Sportsman Choice Award.
The adrenaline rush that hunting brings him hasn’t exactly replaced the one he used to get from outplaying and outwitting 7-footers in the post or dominating in a playoff series, Miller says, but it’s a way to channel his still-burning competitive spirit.
“It’s kind of like that; [you don’t forget] what you learn in basketball, in terms of wanting to win,” he said. “There’s a game plan that goes into basketball ... and there’s a lot of learning and strategy that goes into hunting, too. I’m working on that, figuring out what I enjoy about the hunting part, and it’s been a lot of fun.”