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发帖数: 4860 | 1 MIAMI — The New York Times News Service
Published Monday, Jun. 10 2013, 8:01 PM EDT
Last updated Monday, Jun. 10 2013, 8:02 PM EDT
Tracy McGrady’s sleepy eyes always belied his explosive first step and
premier skills. But injury and erosion awakened him to the fickle realities
of fate and left observers wondering if the eyes have turned from sleepy to
sad.
McGrady, 34, would most likely have been in decline at this point in his
preps-to-pros career no matter what, having entered the NBA in 1997. But
would the drop have been so precipitous that McGrady, finally on the
grandest NBA stage after continual postseason failure, would be a last-
resort sub?
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A seven-time all-star and two-time scoring champion, McGrady gets to play
the leading man now only in practice, simulating LeBron James for the San
Antonio Spurs in preparation for defending James and the Miami Heat in the
NBA final.
“Just facilitate the way he does,” McGrady, a late-season Spurs signee,
said before the Heat evened the best-of-seven series with a 103-84 Game 2
victory last Sunday. “He has a great IQ for the game and a great eye for
picking apart defences, attacking at the right moments. That’s pretty much
what LeBron does and what I was accustomed to doing.”
McGrady and the Spurs must have done something right in practice because
they contained James in one of the tamest halves of his playoff career. But
James began cooking late in the third quarter, the facilitator in full gear.
He picked apart San Antonio’s defence as the Heat turned a close game into
a rout, and he finished with 17 points, eight rebounds, seven assists,
three blocked shots and three steals.
Even at his best McGrady was never quite James’s equal in impact on a team
or stature in the sport. He came into the NBA as a skinny teenager soon to
be compared with Scottie Pippen as a shutdown defender. As time went on, he
became more known for his scoring and was criticized for not carrying a
single team beyond the first round of the playoffs.
His convincing argument is it was seldom, perhaps never, his fault. When
McGrady left the Toronto Raptors in 2000 (after three seasons with the tewam
that drafted him ninth overall) for Orlando to be part of a star medley,
Grant Hill could not stay healthy. Tim Duncan changed his mind about leaving
the Spurs. In Houston, where McGrady was matched with Yao Ming, both had
crippling injuries.
“What ifs?” he said. “That’s what you can put on my career.”
At the final, it is as if McGrady stepped into an alternative universe of
what might have been. Asked if it was a frustrating twist to a career turned
upside down, he said: “It is. But I think what I’ve gone through the last
couple of years has prepared me mentally for not having my number called,
if it doesn’t get called.”
Playing the final eight minutes of a blowout wasn’t what he had in mind,
but McGrady did close the game when Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich pulled
his starters to retrench for Game 3 in San Antonio on Tuesday. He had two
rebounds, two assists, a blocked shot. For what it was worth, he was part of
an NBA final, a long way from where he was months ago.
After a severe knee injury with Houston five years ago, he bounced around
the league and finally out this season, all the way to Asia, where he
averaged 25 points, 7.2 rebounds and 5.1 assists for Qingdao of the Chinese
Basketball Association. He went there not as a means of career preservation
but more as a forum for self-identification.
Level of play notwithstanding, he wanted to again feel like himself.
“Having the ball in my hands, making exciting plays – China gave me that
back, to be able to be celebrated in the fashion that I’m accustomed to
being celebrated on the basketball court,” he said.
Yes, celebrity can occasionally sound like conceit. It can also be quixotic,
capricious, cruel and crazy, even for James, a defending champ. In Game 1,
he rang up a triple-double, including 18 rebounds, and heard ridiculous
nitpicking that his 18 points weren’t enough, that he should have shot more
and passed less.
Here’s what James remembered: With Cleveland in 2007, him against the world
, he couldn’t get a game off the Spurs.
There is always a James critic ready to pounce.
Dennis Rodman, of all experts, recently said had James played in Michael
Jordan’s era, he would have been your run-of-the-mill star.
McGrady rolled his eyes at that, saying: “That’s definitely overboard
because he’s probably one of the most gifted athletes that we’ve ever seen
in our game, any era.” But on the subject of this era, he supported a
change in the draft rules, increasing the current ban on high-school players
to two years from one.
“When I first came in, I mean, you still had M.J. and them guys in the game
,” he said, while owning up to the contradiction of his position. “You
played with men. Now, it’s a bunch of boys.”
Duncan might argue with that, as might Manu Ginobili, Dwyane Wade and even
James, 28, who a decade ago was as man-sized a teenager as one could be.
That season, 2003-04, McGrady averaged a league-leading 28 points, along
with six rebounds and 5.5 assists for the Magic.
He was the scoring king, if not the globally acclaimed King that McGrady has
been playing behind closed doors. Sadly for him, few eyes have been
watching, and no one has ever been celebrated for stardom in practice. |
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