Former New York Knicks lottery pick Michael Sweetney suffered from a depression so deep that he attempted suicide during his rookie year with the team. Sweetney, who lost his father just weeks after the standout Georgetown product was selected No. 9 in the 2003 NBA draft, was dealt from New York two years later, and wrapped up his NBA career in 2007.

Sweetney previously discussed the depths of his illness in great detail in 2015, and he recently revealed his suicide attempt in a discussion with Alex Kennedy at HoopsHype:

“I remember the night,” Sweetney told HoopsHype. “We were in Cleveland one night and I just took a bunch of pain pills, hoping it would take me out. But I woke up the next morning thinking, ‘Well, it didn’t work.’ That’s how bad it was.

“I didn’t like basketball and I just didn’t like life at the time. I went from being a star at Georgetown and having my father at every game, to losing him and not even playing in the NBA. I knew I wasn’t going to be given a chance as a rookie because my coach told me, ‘Hey, I’m not going to play you.’ I had a lot of things going on that were rough for me to handle.”

The 2003-04 Knicks played two games in Cleveland that year, against the Cavaliers and fellow 2003 draft-mate LeBron James. In the first, New York’s fourth game of the season, Sweetney played single-digit minutes for what would be the fourth time in 14 initial NBA contests, missing two of three shots and pulling in a rebound in six minutes.

Midway through the season, beleaguered general manager Scott Layden was dismissed in favor of new president Isiah Thomas, who quickly went to work on a team that didn’t seem to feature an identity. Thomas dealt prospects and picks for Stephon Marbury, while the coach who told Sweetney that he was “not going to play” him, Don Chaney, was cast aside in favor of Lenny Wilkens.

That move didn’t come before New York’s Jan. 6 game in Cleveland, one that saw Sweetney fail to get off the bench in a loss in favor of the similarly shaped (yet quicker to contribute) veteran teammate Othella Harrington.

The Knicks won by 20 in Wilkens’ first game, beating Seattle with Sweetney contributing six points and two rebounds in five minutes of mop-up work, lowest on the squad. Wilkens amped up the rookie’s playing time, though, and by season’s end Sweetney had averaged an OK-enough 4.3 points and 3.7 rebounds in only 12 minutes a contest. Following his second turn in New York, a disastrous year otherwise in Thomas’ first full season as boss, Sweetney had become one of the underdog darlings of the burgeoning NBA advanced statistical community.

That’s not enough to break an illness, though. Sweetney stayed silent throughout his battle, which lasted well past his playing years, due to the stigma that strangled the air in the early aughts:

“I had dug myself into a really deep depression and, at that point, I was really scared to tell anybody. At that time, you had a guy like Ron Artest and people would just say, ‘He’s crazy.’ In reality, he just had some issues that could be resolved. But people were quick to call him crazy and I was suffering from something similar, so I didn’t want to tell anyone.”

Sweetney discussed Metta World Peace, and the era, in an interview from spring with the New York Daily News’ Stefan Bondy:

“Everybody laughed at him and called him crazy. I was just like, ‘Wow, no.’ It was huge that he had that help and somebody that got him through. He had a breakthrough with somebody,” Sweetney said. “People didn’t see it that way, they assumed he was crazy. I’m sure they don’t think that now, the stigma starting to be gone. But at that time, people laughed at him.”

From HoopsHype:

“Even after I tried to commit suicide, nobody really knew. I was suffering really bad. I was in New York, battling this while the media was writing articles about me, and I felt like I had nowhere to go. I just kept digging myself into a deeper hole of depression.”

The early part of the 2000s hardly acted as a stone age, in its attempts to understand mental illness, but for some it certainly was a bad time to be caught sick. With two wars raging and the U.S. economy working through its first significant teeter in a generation, a tale of darkness from a newly knighted New York Knick wasn’t one that scanned well given the ignorance of the time, no matter how relatable.

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