Derrick Coleman, Still Quite Wealthy After All

So, this is a little awkward. Over the weekend, FanHouse posted a link to an announcement advertising the "Derrick Coleman Estate Sale." Since people who have estate sales tend to be either a) dead; or b) in the poor house, we made the easy assumption that he'd fallen on hard times. We were wrong.

Unfortunately, that bad assumption reverberated across the blogosphere and into the MSM (at the very least, the NY Post and Chicago Sun-Times picked it up), eventually making its way to Coleman himself. From Chris Lau of the Detroit Free Press:

All the attention irked Coleman, the No. 1 pick in the 1990 NBA draft. He told the Free Press on Monday that the sale was for furniture from a Franklin Lakes, N.J., house he bought in 2001, when he played for the 76ers. Coleman said the furniture had been in storage since he moved back to Michigan.

"Here I am, trying to do something positive," Coleman said, referring to his business ventures, "and people spend all day calling my phone about a liquidation."

So yeah, he's not poor at all. In fact, he's so rich, he can't even fit all his stuff under one roof. And for the record, he is doing a lot of good things with his money, including investing in areas of Detroit that have been ignored by most developers for decades. Just yesterday, in fact, he opened the city's first Tim Horton's franchise.

So Derrick, consider this FanHouse's apology: we were wrong, you're still rich, and we couldn't be happier.