Jonathan Abrams story this week on Tracy McGrady implies McGrady, like George Gervin before him, was an effortless gunner who scored 30 and didn’t do much else. That’s not true at all.
McGrady was generally considered a very good, if somewhat uneven defender, between 2000-2008. He also averaged like 7-8 rebounds and 5-6 assists per game during this time span. Additionally, McGrady was singled out, like in this 2007 Bill Simmons column (scroll to the bottom), for being a great teammate on both ends of the floor and a great leader. Players and coaches generally seemed to like McGrady, and few players were spoken about as reverentially by their peers.
Obviously, McGrady’s rapid collapse as a player post-2008 and his 0-7 record in playoff series (before this season as a Spurs practice player for the practice players) is pretty damaging to his career evaluation. But he got legitimately injured and he never ‘choked’ in any of these series….In fact in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007 he memorably stepped his game up. Unlike, say, Kevin Garnett’s T-wolf tenure, McGrady did not shirk his duties as go-to playoff guy.
The unoriginal conclusion here is that McGrady is not some tragic-athlete-figure but a really, really good basketball player, probably one of the 60-70 greatest players of all-time. In the early 00’s, the best players were, in rough order, Shaq, Tim Duncan, Kobe, T-Mac, Iverson, Jason Kidd, and Garnett. Back then, few would question the assertion that Kobe and T-Mac were roughly equivalent in their greatness and that the Lakers would have been just as good with T-Mac. Perhaps that notion — that Kobe = T-Mac — was a little off, but the recent appraisals of T-Mac as having a disappointing career seem overly harsh.