Tracy McGrady could have been the GOAT
Tracy McGrady. A man who was is essential part of one of the biggest "what-if" scenarios of our time.
A man plagued with injures. A man many people would argue as the BEST player in the NBA. He was
drafted with the 9th pick in the 1997 drafted by the Toronto Raptors. After 2 years of coming off of the
bench, Tracy was given starters minutes in his third year in the league. McGrady averaged 15 points
6 rebounds and 2 blocks that year. Him and his second cousin VC led the Raptors to the playoffs but
were bounced in the first round. McGrady was a free agent that year and decided to take his talents to
South Beach Orlando. McGrady absolutely exploded in his first year in Orlando averaging 27 points, 8
rebounds, 5 assist to go along with 1.5 steals and 1.5 blocks per game. McGrady led the league in scoring
in back-to-back years. However, things weren't going anywhere in Orlando and McGrady was traded to
the Rockets in a 7 player deal
McGrady, whose combination of size, speed, power and grace beguiled the NBA in the last years of the
20th century and made him one of the league's most dominant offensive forces in the early years of the
21st. But while McGrady's abilities were awe inspiring, his willingness to further cultivate them wasn't,
according to panelist and ESPN NBA analyst Jeff Van Gundy, who coached the Florida-born star with
the Houston Rockets from 2004 through 2007.McGrady was as close to he's ever seen as a basketball
natural, Van Gundy went on to say that T-Mac "should be a Hall of Fame player."
"His talent was otherworldly," Van Gundy said. Van Gundy's tone was echoed by his fellow panelist and
former employer, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who inherited McGrady when he
took the Rockets' reins in 2007. After praising McGrady's talents, Morey said, "I do think (that ability)
got in the way of Tracy's development." The basic principle makes some sense. If you're bigger, stronger,
faster and more talented than the competition you're playing against, you're not forced to develop the
finer points of your game, because when push comes to shove, you can just rely on your superior gifts
to give you the edge you need. And when those gifts start to fade, if you haven't been developing new
skills (or sharpening old ones) for a rainy day, you'll find yourself soaking wet in a storm that might just
wash you away from the league.
Still, I can't help feeling like selecting McGrady as the poster boy for wasted chances is at least partially
a function of our own propensity as writers, observers, executives and fans to jam talented players into
a hyperbolic chamber, imbue them with whatever dreams may come and then get all pissy when they
don't pop out, pure and perfect, exactly the way our imaginations envisioned. Maybe more diligence
would have enabled McGrady to avoid the lower back, left knee and left shoulder injuries that have cost
him wide swaths of playing time over the past nine years, first with the Magic, then with the Rockets
and, in a playing-out-the-string sequence, the New York Knicks and Detroit Pistons. Maybe adhering
to a better class of regimen would have mitigated the fallout of the injuries, or would have gotten a
healthier version of T-Mac back on the court sooner. These are reasonable possibilities. With all that
said, it would be ludicrous to act like McGrady hasn't turned in what one can argue is still a Hall of Fame-
caliber career, even with the allegedly abysmal habits and all the time he's spent on the shelf, especially
considering that this is a Hall of Fame that includes the likes of myriad college and foreign players that
never attained nearly the level of individual notoriety that T-Mac has.
McGrady led the league in scoring twice and finished in the top 10 six times. He's made seven All-
NBA teams (two first-team, three second-team, two third-team) and produced a 2002-03 season
for the "perhaps the most underappreciated great season in NBA history." And according to the Hall
of Fame Probability Rankings on Basketball-Reference.com, McGrady has the 13th-best shot for
enshrinement of any active ballplayer, right between Chris Paul and Amar'e Stoudemire. (The top 10
are virtual locks for Springfield. Vince Carter's 11, and he'll be the subject of some debate when his time
comes, I'm sure.)
The most famous knock against McGrady is that he's never made it out of the first round of the
playoffs he reached the second round in 2009 with the Rockets, but wasn't playing but that critique is
somewhat softened when you remember that the teams he was supposed to take to greener pastures
often featured sidelined or compromised primary running buddies like Grant Hill and Yao Ming. Tracy
McGrady was one of the BADDEST MEN on the planet from 2000 through 2006, but because he
frequently had to go to war as a one man gang against opposition that had better arsenals, he lost. Are
his practice habits to blame for that, too? Do we offer context for the losses, or merely count them as a
black mark on his permanent record, as well?
"Freakish" sets McGrady's talent apart, but not necessarily in a positive way; it makes him an
undefined "other," a dude capable of feats beyond our ken. In most walks of life, we tend to regard such
others skeptically, looking for what makes them somehow wrong and us somehow right. We look past
the 18,000-plus points McGrady has scored and see only the 10,000 more we feel pretty confident he
should have pocketed if only he wasn't screwing around, because what can't superheroes do, right?
Later in the session, when discussing the acquisition of new players via the draft or free agency,
Gladwell asked whether sports teams tend to overvalue potential while undervaluing what skills
players actually have. In McGrady's case, it feels like Van Gundy, Morey and their likeminded folk are
overvaluing what they perceived his absolute ultimate ceiling to be, agreeing that he didn't reach it, and
waxing wistful about what could have been, all the while undervaluing how lethal a force McGrady was
when he was right and had it all cooking.