[CHRONIC] McGrady gets his minutes and a chance. Rockets get closure and a win.

http://blogs.chron.com/nba/2010/03/rockets_116_knicks_112_mcgrady.html

This time, when Tracy McGrady told his coach he wanted more playing time, the coach gave McGrady what he wanted.

Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni was probably going to return Danilo Gallinari to the floor and leave it at that. McGrady had played 28 minutes, roughly his usual playing time. And like Rick Adelman when he was giving McGrady seven minutes a night, D'Antoni was not about to change his routine.

Up until then, however, McGrady had played well. He had made 6 of 8 shots, scoring 15 points. The guy's skills are still off the charts. There was one drive on the baseline that was spectacular because he could do it without quickness and with jumping ability, meaning every step had to be just right.

If McGrady called it a day there, it would have been a pretty good day's work. To his credit, he told D'Antoni he wanted back in.

If wins mattered to the Knicks the way they mattered to the Rockets back in December when Adelman stuck to the first-half cameo plan, D'Antoni might have told McGrady to keep his seat, but D'Antoni gave McGrady the final five minutes to write his happy ending.

"He was kind of jacked up. He wanted to play," D'Antoni said. "I thought, why not? ... give him a chance to go ahead and do it."

McGrady could not do it. Jared Jeffries blocked McGrady's next shot and McGrady missed his last two, looking as if he wanted no part of the offense the rest of the way.

As he stood in front of the Rockets bench in the final minutes, Chuck Hayes and Kyle Lowry taunted with intentionally loud praise for Jeffries' defensive plays on him, inspiring McGrady to laugh along.

They were gently teasing, but they also made a good point.

Jeffries, who came to the Rockets after four years as nearly as controversial figure in New York as McGrady began in Houston, had come up huge his way in the part of the game McGrady could not. He drew four charges and blocked two shots in the fourth quarter, when the Rockets held the Knicks to 18 points with just one field goal in a 10-1 run to the win.

Jordan Hill, the Knicks lottery pick who became a key to the trade, had a career-high 13 against his former team just hours after D'Antoni intimated that did not play Hill because he does not play "bad rookies."

Both seemed to enjoy playing well down the stretch and getting the win than in sticking it to their former team or D'Antoni. About the strongest thing Hill said in response to D'Antoni was "That's just him."

McGrady also displayed no animosity. It's still not clear if when McGrady said he was "mistreated" by the Rockets he meant when he asked for a leave of absence and the Rockets said "yes" or when he wanted to be traded to the Knicks and was.

More likely, he meant that he could not determine his playing time, though there have been players before him that were not permitted to choose when and how much they play.

"There was no falling out," Adelman said. "I don't know where that came from. Maybe he feels that way. If he could have played and he would have helped us, I would have played him. Why would you not want to win games? He does things when he's healthy that no one else can do. We have a lot of young guys we're playing. Certainly the way the situation was with the contract and everything else, it was pretty evident something could happen by the trade deadline.

"He wasn't ready to play. It's a very simple explanation. He missed the year before. He came back. He wanted to come back. And play but last year, we played him one leg. But we had Yao. We had Ron Artest and we were able to do that for awhile and get by, but this year, it was really hard to put him out there where he really wasn't ready. When he came here, it was two months since the time we had him. Hopefully, he's better now. He's playing better and he's moving better. We needed him to be playing at a high level to help us. It really wasn't fair to just throw him out there and let him play when we had other people."

On Sunday, however, he got to put himself back in the game with a chance to win it.

Instead, the players the Rockets got in the deal — Jordan Hill, Jeffries and Kevin Martin — shined. And while McGrady missed his final three shots, the player that succeeded him as the Rockets closer, Aaron Brooks, made his last three to drive the Rockets to the win.

With that, both had what they wanted. McGrady went somewhere he could get his playing time. The Rockets got the players to give them a better chance to win.