Did Vince Carter Mean to Injure Patrick McCaw?
In this week’s roundtable, the GSC panel debates the circumstances and motivations behind Vince Carter’s undercutting of Patrick McCaw.
Scary injuries have been making their rounds in the NBA, and one struck the Warriors’ Pat McCaw. As McCaw went up for a layup against the Kings, Vince Carter undercut him, resulting in McCaw hitting the floor hard. There were two notable immediate reactions: Warriors head coach Steve Kerr yelling about how Carter “should know better,” and Carter, who looked absolutely horrified and was emotional as McCaw was taken off the court on a stretcher. Carter, who despite being known for his sportsmanship, has been criticized for sticking his arm out while McCaw was in the air. Do you think Carter intentionally injured McCaw?
Parker Goss: Vince absolutely didn’t mean to injure him, point blank. Freak injuries happen, and Kerr wasn’t necessarily in the wrong by being upset with him because it was a lazy contest. But, if we are going to get after every lazy contest in the NBA, it’s gonna be a shitshow. He later acknowledged his overreaction, and Vince met with Kerr and the rest of the Warriors bench, so it seems like a non-issue at this point. The look of horror on VC’s face says it all; people are just prone to volatile reactions when a fall looks that bad. This is just a conversation that people feel like has to be had after a potentially career-altering play takes place, and it was/will quickly be sorted out here.
serge: I will not 100 percent definitively say that Vince Carter, the patron saint of my heart and the never-aging dunk champion, had intent or not. But, based on what I know, I will be willing to bet that he didn’t (and that’s my highest level of commitment as not a gambling person). Moments in sports happen, and you often have to make a split-second decision. I’ve been on both ends of that. Once, I got undercut going for a dunk and landed on my back, putting me out of commission for a month. Another time, I had a hard swipe foul that ended up dislocating someone’s shoulder. When you play, you make a second to make a call, and then you live with it. No athlete wants to inflict that kind of intentional hurt on someone else. Unless you’re Zaza Pachulia.
Micah Wimmer: I don’t believe Vince Carter intended to injure Patrick McCaw, and I believe you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who think otherwise. Even McCaw and his teammates seem to be in unanimous agreement on that point. It seems that Carter just got caught in an awkward situation — somewhere between contesting the shot and removing himself from the play entirely — and unfortunately, McCaw suffered from Carter’s indecisiveness. There are certainly players who—due to a streak of prolonged carelessness on the court—have lost the benefit of the doubt in such matters, but Carter is not one of them.
Brandon Anderson: Come on, Vince? This is a dude that used to dunk on George Mikan back in the day. Haven’t we seen enough to trust him by now? Nobody thinks Vince purposely injured McCaw, including Steve Kerr. Kerr’s just a coach concerned and sticking up for his guys.The guys above are right. The horrified look on Carter’s face is all you needed to know.
Dan Szczepanek: It looks like I’m going to be the lone dissenting voice here. I’ll preface this by saying I don’t think Carter meant to send McCaw out on a stretcher — the look of horror on Carter’s face when he realized the extent of his actions was no doubt genuine and sincere, and dispels any notion of that. That being said, I’ve watched the play and Carter’s face in the moment more times than I care to admit, and you can’t convince me that Carter didn’t have a ‘kid-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar’ grin as he gave McCaw that little bump. The lackadaisical way in which Carter feigns getting out of the way was a LeBron-esque bit of pageantry.
As for the why (and especially, why now?), I’d only be guessing, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that the frustration of putting your 40-year-old body through the grind of a meaningless NBA season on a team that seems mostly thankless to your contributions and commitment would weigh on any athlete, even a consummate professional like VC. Those bouts of frustration manifest all the time in competitive landscapes (who hasn’t given any opponent a little extra tug as they blow by them for the umpteenth time in pick-up?), and from the clip, it looks like exactly that happened here. Had McCaw landed normally, him and Carter might have had a light shoving match, Carter would have blown off some steam, and nobody would be talking about this anymore. Sadly, sometimes deliberate actions have horrific unintended consequences, and that’s what I believe happened with Carter.
