Steve Francis on biggest career what-if, Maryland no longer being in the ACC, Mark Turgeon and more

Steve Francis’s time at Maryland was brief but his legacy still lives on in College Park.

He led the Terps to a 28-6 record, a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament and earned first-team All-ACC honors in his lone collegiate season before embarking on a 10-year NBA career that featured many highs, lows and everything in between.

The high-flying guard’s NBA career began a downward trend after being traded from the Houston Rockets following the 2003-04 season, but Francis’s biggest “what-if” moment goes back to the moment he entered the league and got his first taste of the business side of basketball. He was considered to be one of the best players in the 1999 NBA draft, along with Elton Brand, Baron Davis, and Lamar Odom, and he wished to be selected by the Chicago Bulls, not only because it would mean being the first player off the board but also because he wanted to follow in the footsteps of Michael Jordan, his favorite player as a kid growing up outside of the nation’s capital. He met with the Bulls before the draft and came away from the meeting so confident that he was their guy that he spent weeks shopping for a house in Chicago. That confidence turned to disappointment on draft night, though, when the Bulls selected Brand instead, bringing Francis to tears (and not the happy kind) after he was selected No. 2 overall by the Vancouver Grizzlies.

“I think my whole team was surprised [that the Bulls didn’t pick me],” Francis said during an appearance on Barstool Radio last week. “Let me tell you for real, if [Bulls general manager] Jerry Krause wouldn’t have had me shopping for a house in Chicago and telling me he was going to draft me, that’s the big ‘if’, right? I was in Chicago for a while looking at places and things like that. I kind of knew he was just saying those things to me while I was there. I kind of got that feeling at the beginning. It takes experience from other situations like the IQ test and all those things that he made us do like seven times that doesn’t relate to basketball at all. But it was a great experience not only from a basketball aspect but just being recruited on that level and just being able to apply that to the real world.”

Francis had a terrific rookie season in the NBA after the Grizzlies granted his wish and traded him, averaging 18 points, 6.6 assists and 5.3 rebounds per game for the Rockets. He shared rookie of the year honors with Brand, who earned National and ACC Player of the Year over Francis the year before at Duke. More than two decades later, the three-time NBA all-star still feels slighted by the decision.

“I guess I knew politics even back then, huh? I guess I knew back then what it was going to be like,” he said. “But hey, it was a good time playing. Just seeing him, I was in the Western Conference and we barely played against each other, but it was a good experience.”

Francis also finished runner-up to another ACC foe in the NBA dunk contest that year. But he deemed Vince Carter, who left North Carolina the year before he arrived at Maryland, a worthy winner after he completed three of the most memorable dunks of all-time, including the “elbow in the rim” dunk which led to a popular reaction GIF still used today of him signaling to the camera that the contest was over.

“The impact of him putting his hand in the rim, I think everybody was still stunned,” Francis said. “As you look around through the crowd and you see all the players, like, what did we just witness. Just to see somebody even think of doing something like that, we all still were in awe of that dunk. It was unreal to witness. Just like myself, he didn’t even stretch that much. He was just ready to put on a show.”

More from Francis…

On whether he’s adjusted to Maryland no longer being in the ACC: “Well, I mean we did a little work over there this year in the Big Ten, of course, but coach [Mark] Turgeon is on the right path recruiting and starting to get some local players.

“But the ACC has always been Tobacco Road standard type league with all the North Carolina teams getting the probable schedules and calls and things like that, so it’s not big deal. As long as the Terp tradition continues to blossom in the Big Ten, we’ve got no issues.”

On playing against Ron Artest and falling to St. John’s in the Sweet 16: “They had like three people on me the whole game and he was shadowing me. But I knew him through the East Coast basketball circuit. I already knew that he was an aggressive basketball player who had a basketball IQ that was out of the world from some people I knew from New York. As for as him being Ron, that’s just him, his own personality. And you know, he eventually won an [NBA] championship and he’s doing great right now.”

On his initial thoughts on playing with Yao Ming: “If he could speak English. I wanted to know that just so we could relate and have great conversation. But he had an interpreter that actually went to the University of Maryland, Colin Pine, who’s a Maryland alumni, so I was able to talk to him from the first day and get some things that we were trying to accomplish across to him.

“Communication is very key. Of course when you see 200-300 cameras at every single practice, every single shootaround, bus stop, so it was kind of hard for him to adjust to it at the beginning, but I thought he did a great job.” (Note: Pine didn’t attend Maryland, but was from Baltimore and grew up a Terps fan.)

On ending his career in China: “It was tough, man. The flight was so long. When I got there they wanted me to play and I was so exhausted. It was different. The referees reffed themselves; the smaller cities, the accommodations. But you know, for somebody who loves basketball, I thought it was something I try to experience. When I got over there, a lot of things weren’t like they said they’d be so I made a decision to return back to the United States and left it like that.

They wanted me to play not fresh, but yeah, pretty much [fresh off the plane]. And I was like, man, I can’t even stand up. The crowd was yelling, people were like why aren’t you playing, and I was like, man, why aren’t I sleeping? So it was kind of a controversy like I came over there not to play, and I was like look man, let me get some rest. But it looks like they’re getting better over there with those types of things to accommodate some of the players coming from overseas. It was funny, though. I was like, what?”

On the New York Knicks: “I think the focus with the Knicks, you know, you have to win the community back. The players are getting paid X amount of dollars, everybody knows that they did a great job upgrading the Garden; I went in there and didn’t know where I was at. And you know, you have to start with the community to get the fans behind you and believe the movement that you’re making. Without that, you can trade and have the biggest names play there, but playing in the Garden is a tough place to play. Hopefully they’ll find a way to get it turned around. With some new talent and the coaching staff, hopefully they’ll be able to [turn things around].”

On what he's been up to lately: "Nothing, man. I’m just relaxing with the coronavirus, very little bit of access to the outside world, but it’s a good time to sit back and reflect and look at the future with all the things that are going on. So it’s a good thinking time for me."