NBA Insider with Ken Berger

This is the kind of news that hits you and knocks the wind out of you and makes you say, “Damn.”

Eddie Griffin, dead in a car accident.

Eddie Griffin, 25.

Eddie Griffin, the seventh overall pick in the 2001 draft by the Nets, gone.

He was driving a Nissan SUV that plowed through a railroad barrier and warning lights and collided with a freight train in Houston last week. The fiery blaze burned the driver’s body beyond recognition, which is why it took three days and dental records to identify the dead as Griffin.

How sad.

Griffin seemed destined for NBA stardom when he came out of Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia seven years ago, when I was working there as a sports writer for The Associated Press. I remember an enormously hyped game between Griffin’s team and Dajuan Wagner’s Camden High. That was about as far as the basketball highlights went for both of them.

Griffin had just turned 19 when the Rockets traded three first-round picks to the Nets for his rights on draft night, 2001. After two nondescript seasons in Houston during which Griffin struggled on the court and with alcohol, he was released in 2003 training camp. He left with drinking demons, depression, and a conviction on charges of deadly conduct for punching a woman and firing a gun at her.

He was signed by the Nets, but never played a game for them before he was released. He sat out the entire 2003-04 season before winding up in Minnesota, where Kevin Garnett tried to take him under his wing. Griffin played well enough to earn a three-year, $8.1 million contract, but was released in the second year of the deal. Garnett once said, “Eddie was the only person that ever stopped Eddie.”

That appeared to have been the case right to the tragic end.

“Eddie was a wonderful, gentle soul, but he was an alcoholic,” Griffin’s attorney, Rusty Hardin, told the Houston Chronicle. “Alcohol always got in the way.”

Griffin’s attempts at recovery included treatment for clinical depression and a stint at the Betty Ford Center for alcohol abuse.

John Lucas, the former Rockets guard and a former addict himself, tried to help Griffin in his unofficial basketball and rehab center in Houston. Upon hearing the news, upon hearing that Eddie Griffin, 25, had ignored all the warning signs and plowed his SUV into a speeding freight train at 1:30 a.m. last Friday, Lucas couldn’t have said it any better.

“Eddie is free now,” Lucas said.

Rest in peace, Eddie Griffin.