Where are they now: Isaiah Rider

[Andrew]

Former NBA player Isaiah Rider arrested

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Former NBA player Isaiah Rider was jailed Saturday for investigation of auto theft, police said.
Rider, 37, was driving a car that failed to stop at an intersection about 2:30 a.m. in the city's Skid Row district, Officer Norma Eisenman said.

Officers checking the license plates discovered the car had been reported stolen from South Los Angeles, and Rider was arrested, police said.

He remained in the Los Angeles County jail on $25,000 bail, according to information on the website for the county Sheriff's Department.

A sad state of affairs when your name keeps coming up after your career is over, for all the wrong reasons.

[Indy]

What the fuck was he doing in skid row? That's where all the homeless people live.

Rider makes me sad. He could still be in the league if he had played his cards right and been smart. Seems like its been forever since he's played and he's only 37.

Hopefully he turns his life around and uses his story as a positive for himself. Doing stuff like talking to rookies at the rookie seminar about the mistakes you can make that can make your career disappear. He is a cautionary tale for those guys.

[Andrew]

He's a perfect cautionary example but he'd need to clean his act up first. From the last part of that article, it sounds like it's one incident after another for him these days.

[Patr1ck]

He was probably looking for crack.

[Sauru]

yeah i would say that he is pretty much the prime example of what not to do when you make it big as an athlete

[Mayerhendrix]

I think the saddest of them all has to be Shawn Kemp.

[Lamrock]

I would say Eddie Griffin is the saddest.

[Indy]

Obviously Len Bias is the saddest, that cannot be topped.

[joejam999]

I think the saddest of them all has to be Shawn Kemp.

Actually he lost all the weight, has a family and has stayed away from drugs and everything the past 3 years. He was playing overseas last year but now I don't know what he is doing.

I remember a few years back on TNT John Thompson did an interview with Rider about trying to come back and not doing drugs and everything. Looks like he never tried.

[Andrew]

I think the saddest of them all has to be Shawn Kemp.

Actually he lost all the weight, has a family and has stayed away from drugs and everything the past 3 years. He was playing overseas last year but now I don't know what he is doing.

Agreed. Kemp's NBA career may have fizzled and not really ended on his terms but it seems that his post-NBA life has been fairly positive, save for a couple of incidents that derailed a potential comeback a couple of years ago.

[Matt]

i guess he doesn't have enough to cover the bond.....too much crack smokin young man!

[Sauru]

Obviously Len Bias is the saddest, that cannot be topped.

this much is obvious to me. no one in any sport(major 4 american anyway) can claim to be a bigger tragedy than len bias. i would put bo jackson as the biggest for players who had short careers due to injury

[J@3]

I would say Eddie Griffin is the saddest.

Yeah I'd go with Griffin too. Bias is a sad case but he was just a moron, Griffin obviously suffered alot mentally considering all his issues over the years and if it's true that his death wasn't accidental (i.e he killed himself) then it's even worse. What a horrible, painful way to go out... plus he left behind a daughter.

[Leander]

Just looking up things. Didn't know that Griffin died.

Len Bias' death is just tragic. Imagine the second pick of any NBA draft over the last couple of years...look at his stats and his progress. Then imagine he had never played because he died of drugs before his first NBA game. Horrible.

What other players died? I only know of B. Phills and another player whose name I can't remember at the moment.

Fortunately the NBA has been spared from huge tragedies. A plane could crash for example, a whole team killed like the soccer club Manchester United years ago. No, hopefully this won't ever happen. I sometimes do think about safety and all this flying from game to game though.

Some months ago I looked up wrestlers I liked when I was young. I was a bit shocked by the fact that really many of them have died by now.

[Jeffx]

Damn, how low does a MFer have to go before the light bulb goes off in his head?

Rider is the poster boy for "wasted potetial". Dude had game, but he pissed it all away.

[Dan's Brain]

What other players died? I only know of B. Phills and another player whose name I can't remember at the moment.

There's been a few. Most recently have been Eddie Griffin, Jason Collier, Eddie Griffin, Malik Sealy.

Over the last 20 years you could expand the list to include Drazen Petrovic, Reggie Lewis as well as the other names that people have already mentioned.

Not to mention Yinka.

[Patr1ck]

Both of the Eddie Griffin's died?

[Sauru]

i dont see how griffin can be considered the worst ever, not when you consider the level a player len bias was. maybe i am biased cause if he lived and played with bird the celtics would have completly raped the nba and the entire look of the nba would have been much much different than it was

[Skills]

I remember some people saying that if Bias was in the NBA, Jordan would have a rival.
The Celtics could have won those titles that went to MJ's Bulls.. etc.
But yeah, that's life. Eddie Griffin's story is really sad too. A daughter without a father..

[Mayerhendrix]

I think the saddest of them all has to be Shawn Kemp.

Actually he lost all the weight, has a family and has stayed away from drugs and everything the past 3 years. He was playing overseas last year but now I don't know what he is doing.

Agreed. Kemp's NBA career may have fizzled and not really ended on his terms but it seems that his post-NBA life has been fairly positive, save for a couple of incidents that derailed a potential comeback a couple of years ago.

Still though, all of it's post-NBA. Sure it wasn't as bad as some of these other guys but I think if you put it as a ratio (for lack of a better word) of how they fared to how they could've been then Kemp definitely has to rank as one of the sad stories of the NBA.

[benji]

Bias also could've been another guy who "dominated" college just to fizzle out in the NBA. I mean 23/7 with almost no assists, blocks or steals? Glenn Robinson averaged 30/10 in college, Kurt Thomas had 30/15.

Bias + Lewis was a hell of a one-two punch for that franchise though.

I'm not arguing against/for Bias being the saddest. I don't find any NBAers death to be particularly sad.

Oh, and Rider is one of those many empty 20 point scorers we had to suffer through from 94-2000 thanks to the worthless series of drafts at the start of the decade.

Speaking of NBA flame outs, I've always had a fondness for this one:

[Leon] Smith was raised in a foster home, called Lydia Home for Foster Children, as a ward of the state of Illinois due to neglect from his parents when he was five years old.[1]

Smith was selected out of Chicago's Martin Luther King High School by the San Antonio Spurs in the first round (29th overall) of the 1999 NBA Draft and was immediately traded to the Dallas Mavericks in exchange for the draft rights to Gordan Giricek and a second-round pick in the 2000 NBA Draft. Before ever playing a game with the Mavs, he was released in February 2000.[2] A month previous, Smith was released from a psychiatric ward to where he was committed for several weeks, after an incident in which he threw a rock through a car window and swallowed approximately 250 aspirin tablets.

[Dan's Brain]

Both of the Eddie Griffin's died?

Mentioned him twice, because i agree that he's the saddest.

[Axel]

Rider makes me sad.

He pisses me the fuck off. People with that kind of wasted talent don't deserve to use up the rest of the world's oxygen.

There are a lot of people out there who weren't endowed with natural gifts like his, and the fact that he has squandered them for a life of crime and immaturity makes me entirely unsympathetic to his situation.

[J@3]

i dont see how griffin can be considered the worst ever, not when you consider the level a player len bias was. maybe i am biased cause if he lived and played with bird the celtics would have completly raped the nba and the entire look of the nba would have been much much different than it was

So you think it was the worst because he could've been a good player... that's pretty shallow reasoning. Well, extremely shallow reasoning.

[Patr1ck]

Maybe he's Len biased....