(AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

To satisfy your Wizards fix, DCist is teaming up with Kyle Weidie and Rashad Mobley of Truth About It, who will take turns penning a column on Washington’s professional basketball team every week throughout the season. You can read Kyle and Rashad on all things Wiz here.

Earlier this month, Washington Post Wizards beat writer Michael Lee wrote an excellent feature piece on the top pick in the 2010 NBA Draft, John Wall. The premise of the article was that Wall’s adjustments to the NBA are two-fold. On one hand he has to run the Wizards, take on guards like Derrick Rose and Steve Nash, and develop into an elite NBA player. But off the court he has just as formidable challenges like cooking, laundry and determining who he can and cannot invite into his inner circle.

Once I finished that article, I could not help but to think back to a time when another Washington Post staff member wrote the same type of piece about yet another Wizards number one draft pick.

In April 2002, at the conclusion of the Wizards’ regular season, the Washington Post Magazine ran an article by Sally Jenkins about Kwame Brown, entitled, “Growing Pains”. While Wall’s article painted a picture of a man who was innocent and still learning how to be a man, Jenkins painted Brown as immature, naive and lost. The most damning passage in the article had to do with Kwame balling up his suits, and throwing in them corner, rather than taking them to be dry cleaned.

After I recently re-read the Kwame article — and after I heard Steve Czaban of Sportstalk 980 unfavorably compare Wall to Kwame — I decided that a comparison of the two players was in order. I wanted to see which player had the best chance to succeed on and off the court, which player had the best mentor(s), and how did both players prepare for the NBA.