Tracy McGrady: A Flawed Star from a Flawed Era of Basketball
Happy Birthday, T-Mac
There are three inarguable truths that those of my generation, the goddamn, lazy millennials born between roughly 1990 and 1997, hold to be true:
- Heath Ledger’s Joker is the best theatrical performance of our lifetime.
- Jennifer Aniston has not aged a day since the pilot episode of Friends and Brad Pitt is a fool.
- Orlando-era Tracy McGrady was a very, very, bad man.
McGrady seemed to be a player that would be lost in the annals of history, a footnote, though a wholly entertaining and transformative one, in the post-Jordan, pre-LeBron NBA. His recent time serving as an analyst for ESPN, however, including his idiotic comments on the supposedly watered-down NBA of 2016 as it relates to Stephen Curry, will likely make him stay in the minds of hoop heads for the foreseeable future, but maybe not exactly for the right reasons.
Will the Curry generation simply remember him as the evolution of Charles Barkley and the Inside the NBA crew, former stars shooting the shit about “back in the day” and how kids these days just don’t get it as if they’re a bunch of old heads sitting in a barbershop without actually getting their hair cut? Will they remember him for his absurdly oversized suits that make it seem like he shares the same tailor as Allen Iverson?
It’d be a shame if those things are true. They’re missing out on a guy who was able to do this, a dunk so humiliating that it bridges the gap between Scottie Pippen over Patrick Ewing and Blake Griffin over Timofey Mozgov as the NBA’s premier “You Just Got Put on a Poster” dunk:
McGrady, as well as his cousin Vince Carter, are emblematic of a certain era of the league’s history: the time between Michael’s second, and, unfortunately, not final, retirement and the emergence of the LeBron/Carmelo/Wade/Bosh quadrant as basketball’s top stars on to the current boom in talent between Steph, the Durant and Westbrook duo, Kawhi Leonard and Karl-Anthony Towns.
That period has been washed over to a degree when discussing the great history of this league and rightfully so at times. The extreme isolation ball that Jordan inspired made for mind-numbingly poor offensive decisions and shots. My childhood hero, Allen Iverson, was not immune to such putrid mid-range pull-ups. Along with Antoine Walker, Stephon Marbury, Jerry Stackhouse and countless other faux-stars who survived simply on their points per game numbers, the league was in bad shape.
There was also the shitstorm of disaster that was the early-2000s Eastern Conference, which saw two Byron Scott-led teams make the NBA Finals, as well as the rag-tag group of has-beens and never-wases that Iverson drug to the 2001 Finals. The two elite East teams of the time frame, the Jermaine O’Neal/Ron Artest Pacers and the Ben Wallace Pistons, meanwhile, slugged it out in playoff games where both teams frequently failed to score more than 80 points in a single contest, before slugging the shit out of each other at the Malice at the Palace, a swift end to what could’ve been for those Indiana teams.
These are reasons why it would seem simple to forget about this point in the league’s history, but it SHOULD NOT be forgotten. Do American History textbooks not touch upon Reconstruction after diving into the Civil War? Is The Great Depression not lectured on after talks of The First World War? It might not quite be like watching Jordan’s Bulls take on Barkley’s Suns or LeBron and the Heatles’ comeback against San Antonio, but there are things to love:
- Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq was a humongous being who would ram his ass into whatever foolish defender got in his way, turn around, and slam it home. The Shaq of the 2001 playoffs may be the most dominant force I’ve ever seen in the NBA in my young life.
- The Triumvirate of Texas Power Forwards. The early 2000s saw the onset of the primes of arguably the three best fours to ever step on a court: Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki. Each had legendary traits: Duncan’s stoicism and work as a defensive anchor, Garnett’s bloodthirsty, psychopathic DMX-persona and his money jumper from the elbow, and Nowitzki’s redefinition of what a European big man could be and his often-repeated, always-unmatched, leg-kicking fadeaway.
- Tracy Lamar McGrady Jr.
Don’t remember McGrady as the beaten-down guy making unnecessary stops in New York, Atlanta, China and San Antonio to end his career. Remember 2003 Tracy, tearing up the league for the Magic. Because of how frequently I’ve discussed different eras of basketball thus far, I’m going to use McGrady’s per-100 possessions statistics going forward to account for the differences in pace based on year.
For that season, one in which Orlando went an underwhelming 42–40 and lost in the first round after going up 3–1 on the Pistons, McGrady averaged 42.0 points, 8.5 rebounds and 7.2 assists per-100 possessions with a true-shooting percentage of 56.4. There’s only other guy who’s put up those numbers: Michael Jeffrey Jordan, doing so in both 1990 (42.7/8.8/8.1, 60.6 percent) and 1993 (43.0/8.8/7.2, 56.4 percent).
1990 Michael is typically considered the apex of his physical prime at 26, driving and dunking over everything in sight with the ferocity of Russell Westbrook mixed with the acrobatics of young Blake Griffin and the skill of, well, Michael Jordan. 1993 Michael, the one who completed the Bulls’ first three-peat before announcing his first retirement, is at times thought to be the best basketball version of Mike the league saw.
Tracy McGrady ultimately had a season as good as two different peaks of Michael Jordan’s career.
So why isn’t McGrady looked at as an all-time great wing who did a fantastic Jordan impression during his career as Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade are?
Injuries tore him down as his career progressed, sapping him of the otherworldly athleticism that was on display in Toronto, Orlando and the early days of his Houston stint.
T-Mac played just 47 games in 2006 before playing in 71 in 2007 and making his final All-Star team. His numbers went down each of the next two seasons as a Rocket (66 then 35) before playing only 30 in a split season between Houston and the Knicks. A completely washed McGrady played 72 games for Detroit in 2011 and 52 games for the Hawks in 2012 before suiting up for the Qingdao DoubleStar Eagles of the Chinese Basketball Association.
Those injuries shouldn’t come at the detriment of forgetting about McGrady’s peak though. From 2001 through 2007, the seven seasons in which McGrady was recognized as an All-Star, he averaged 36.3 points, 8.9 rebounds and 7.3 assists per-100 possessions with a true-shooting percentage of 52.8 and a PER of 25.0.
From 2001 through 2007, Bryant averaged 37.8 points, 7.6 rebounds and 6.9 assists per-100 possessions with a true shooting percentage of 55.7 and a PER of 25.1. Young Kobe was more efficient, but not exponentially so. McGrady could hold his own in comparison to him.
Why is Young Kobe looked back on so much more fondly? Well, he played with Shaq and even out-of-shape Shaq showing up guaranteed his squad a few rings, so Kobe got the spotlight and time to shine as a second banana on a three-peating dynasty, which he did so phenomenally.
What if McGrady had played with such talented teammates? Well, he did, sort of. Both McGrady and Grant Hill, who was coming off five-straight All-NBA Team selections, signed in Orlando in the summer of 2000. Tim Duncan, the greatest player between Michael’s retirement and LeBron’s dominance, just nearly signed there during that free agency period as well, a move that could’ve changed the trajectory of about five billion different basketball players', coaches', and executives’ legacies. Hill himself was not immune to the injury bug, which cost him the second half of his prime.
When McGrady was traded to Houston four summers later, he was paired with Yao Ming, a supremely skilled center, but his greatest trait, his 7’6” stature, was his downfall, as mortal men aren’t meant to be that large, resulting in debilitating injuries that ended his career prematurely.
His lack of (healthy) supporting cast resulted in his team never making it out the first round while he was a healthy player, which has unfortunately become the defining mark of his otherwise Hall of Fame career. How great was he really if he couldn’t even carry a squad to the second round?
“The rings or GTFO” mentality of some people is so misplaced, but there is some merit to a supposed star not being able to get out of the first round in a super weak Eastern Conference. His efficiency sank come playoff time with 43.0/30.1/75.6 shooting splits from 2001 through 2008. And what exactly happened with that collapse against Detroit when the Magic were up 3–1 in the series?
The hell if I know, but to say that a guy who once scored 13 points in 35 seconds in the fourth quarter of a playoff game against his generation’s best player (Duncan) and coach (Gregg Popovich) for a comeback win didn’t have “killer instinct” or some other intangible is just flat out wrong.
Basketball blogging pioneer Bethlehem Shoals recently wrote for GQ about the reckless abandonment with which Russell Westbrook plays and how it’s so terrifyingly fantastic to watch. This section was the one that caught my attention the most:
Against this backdrop of rationality, Westbrook is a total anomaly whose genius lies in his ability to fuck shit up. He’s a throwback to brilliant-but-flawed stars like Tracy McGrady, Rasheed Wallace, Chris Webber, Vince Carter, and of course, Allen Iverson, players defined as much by their inconsistencies and shortcomings as their sheer ability. Their play, at once maddening and frightening magnetic, was decidedly imperfect. And you rooted for them because you understood what it meant to succeed and fail at the same time because that’s what most people do most of the time. As shoddy as the product could be at times, it was infinitely more human.
It’s not fun to root for perfection. Would you rather watch and cheer for Chris Paul, maybe the most technically sound and prototypical point guard ever, or whatever the hell you categorize Westbrook’s game as?
In response to that excerpt from Shoals, I tweeted a few things:
I’m very human. I’m very flawed. I like my athletes the same way. Don’t be the person who sits in the corner his/her entire life waiting for someone to give you the ball and get you going. Go fuck shit up. Be Tracy McGrady.
