Brandon Clarke Found Dead In California

Brandon Clarke has died. Paramedics reportedly responded to an emergency call from a home in the San Fernando Valley around dinner time Monday, and declared Clarke dead at the scene. He was 29 years old, and a seven-year NBA veteran who'd played his entire professional career with the Memphis Grizzlies.

The call that brought paramedics to the scene of Clarke's death was, in official jargon, for a medical emergency. Subsequent reporting from NBC4 Los Angeles indicates that Clarke's death is being investigated as a possible drug overdose, and that drug paraphernalia was reportedly found "in the home." ABC News reported from sources later Monday that investigators found narcotics. This is inevitably drawing renewed attention to an incident from April, when Clarke was arrested in Arkansas and charged with possession of a controlled substance. That substance, per reports, was kratom, a traditional medicine derived from the leaves of a tropical evergreen tree, sold commercially as a powder and used as a stimulant. Clarke was found in possession of 200 grams of kratom, which sounds like a lot but is not: The fine powder, which looks and smells like attic dust, with a soupçon of oolong, is sold in comparable quantities at vape shops, dispensaries, and trendy cafés. A company called Earth Kratom, for example, distributes a whole range of kratom products in slickly packaged resealable bags, each containing 250 grams of kratom powder. Arkansas, where Clarke was charged, is one of just a handful of states where possession of kratom is criminalized.

Clarke was a very cool basketball player. He was undersized as a power forward, but he had a special, Blake Griffin-esque relationship with gravity, and could hold his own as a rebounder and rim protector. He was a fearsome lob threat, which gave him a kind of floor-warping gravity of his own when operating as the screener in a well-executed pick-and-roll. I liked to watch him with the ball in his hands: Clarke didn't have a ton of moves, but he liked to drive at the cup, and by his freshman year in college he'd developed a go-to move, leading with his left hand and then spinning back to his right. He was so quick and light-footed that the spin continued to work against plodding opponents deep into Clarke's professional career: In an earlier era, the makers of NBA Showdown would've coded it in there as his signature move.