Four days into a fresh opportunity at redemption, and Darko Milicic is already sulking. The name on the uniform is different, but the seat at the end of the bench hasn't changed. He doesn't get it. And he probably never will.
He can't even play on a team that has given up hope on the season.

"I didn't come here to sit on the bench...I tell myself that everything will be fine here, but right now, nothing has changed. I want to play. I need to play. I learn nothing sitting on the bench."

Nothing has changed. Darko still blames other factors for his inactivity. He eagerly embraced his emancipation from the Pistons, somehow convincing himself that liberation from his self-described "nightmare" would immediately register into consistent playing time with the Magic.
But Darko didn't play one second in his second game with the Magic, Wednesday at New Jersey.

"You have to ask them why," Darko said of the coaches.
Magic coach Brian Hill offered the same refrain that grew age lines in Detroit the last three years. Darko has "tremendous upside," Hill said, but he has to "learn his new surroundings" and grow comfortable with the situation. In other words, he needs to wake up.

Orlando will discover what the Pistons reluctantly learned before they traded him last week. Darko has an unyielding sense of entitlement that will prevent him from fully taking advantage of his physical gifts. He still equates playing time with something gift-wrapped under a Christmas tree.

It's time for Darko to grow up, sack up and maybe wise up. He still holds a grudge against the Pistons for how he thinks they treated him.

"I was pissed," he said. "It was always the same story, same story. They told me to be ready, and I was. They told me to have a good preseason, and I did. But my playing time went to nothing. They didn't want me, so I needed to leave."
But was his time in Detroit really "a nightmare," as he called it this week before he played his first game with the Magic? If anything, Darko's problem is that he has become too Americanized.

A concern remains that Milicic lacks motivation to push himself beyond the fruits already won from being the second overall pick in the 2003 draft. It's still easier to blame somebody else for his shortcomings.

Isn't there a local law on the books prohibiting the Magic from engaging in a business deal with Joe Dumars? Orlando hasn't recovered from the less-than-minimal return on its seven-year, $98 million investment in Grant Hill in 2000. The sign-and-trade deal involving Hill gave the Pistons the backbone of their championship revival - Ben Wallace.

But some people in Orlando think that vengeance is finally theirs, fleecing the Pistons of an unrefined talent they ruined solely by neglect.

Sounds like the Magic Kingdom has been sniffing Tinker Bell's pixie dust.