Foggy memories of the T-Mac/Yao era. Couple of questions...

Yao was more of today's big man under Rudy T

JVG and Ewing turned him into a traditional post up player

 

Tmac only had a true shooting percentage above 50 percent in one playoff series which was his first season as a rocket. The rest of his rocket's playoff career was below 50 percent. Just for reference, Gerald Green's career playoff TS% is 53.3 percent. As a said before, T-mac is fool's gold. His lack of playoff success can be easily explained by his true shooting percentages. Tmac's picture is next to the entry for "chucker" in the dictionary.

 

Its way too easy for you to call hof caliber person lazy. Do you realize how much practice it takes to get to his skill level ? Physical talent is one thing, but he was reading and reacting to the game at the highest levels. Those handles and offensive moves werent given to him man put some respect on the all time great. His body wasnt meant for unreal load of NBA and by the time he decided to get stronger(2005 offseason) and got best fitness of his life his body completely gave up after couple of months. Its not meant for everybody i know ex nba players stories that say you get roids in the beggining of tenure in the league and either your body holds up and you good or you break down like glass and you can clearly see that in some players

Stop disrespecting alltime level players that just cant give more... tmac and yao then, cp now

 

With all the excuses, T-Mac was the Jessie Smullett of the NBA

 

It's hard to say if this was good or bad. The beating he took and the weight he had to gain to play in the post maybe led to his career ending so early. However, he was such a dominant force down low. Can you really blame them for turning him into that?

 

Kobe is career 55%. Thats lower than Paul George, who do you take? Iverson is 52%. So youre saying Gerald Green/Bradley Beal are better than Iverson and Tmac? Statistics without context dont mean ****. Put Tmac or Iverson in todays league and they would spend comparable time at the FT to Harden skyrocketing their TS%. You call Tmac a chucker but allow him to take 20 threepointers a game and give him todays rules in slashers favour and see what happens.

 

He played 20 playoff games for the Rockets

I came from Olajuwon ERA, dude played 140 playoff games

that's 7 times more than T-mac

Tmac fans can't lecture Dream era fans, in ANYTHING

@Zboy

Tmac = Jussie Smollet of Rockets history

 

The issue is he never took a break, he had to play with the chinese team for the olympics

also it sucked nobody can pass him the ball in the post

 

1) Game 7 in 2007 was lost for 2 reasons. First, the Rockets got off to a horrendous start in the first half. They spotted the Jazz a 16-point lead. They finally came back to take a 5-point lead halfway through the 4th quarter, but T-Mac was spent by then and had nothing left in the tank. Second, they couldn't grab a damn defensive rebound to save their lives. They were down only one point with 1:40 to go, but Utah got an offensive rebound off a miss and Okur hit a 3 to put the Jazz up 4. Then after 2 Yao free throws, the Jazz had the ball with about a minute left and got 2 offensive rebounds off of 2 Okur missed 3's. At that point, the Rockets were forced to foul and Utah made all their free throws. Game(and series) over.

Part of this deficiency was due to the Rockets simply not having the personnel. They had essentially a 7 man rotation and were relying on Juwan Howard to play heavy minutes at the 4. Also though, the Jazz simply outhustled the Rockets in that 4th quarter(in part due to the energy used up coming back from 16 points down). What's sad is the following season, the front office did a great job adding depth with Scola and Landry(along with Jackson in the backcourt), but then Yao went down and torpedoed their title chances.

2) Yes, 05-06 was an injury-riddled season. T-Mac hurt his back in the opener(I think) against Sactown. The Rockets got off to a horrendous start that season and were pretty much never in the playoff race. Yao also got hurt for the first time in his career that year. And to add insult to injury, he and T-Mac were always hurt at different times, so the Rockets were constantly missing one of their stars. The one positive that season was that when Yao came back from his injury, he elevated his game to superstar level. He'd always been an All-Star, but he started to dominate that year. Well, there was one other positive. The #8 pick in the draft that was turned into Shane Battier.

 

I disagree with this. Kobe Bryant by the accounts of any statistically minded person is probably THE most overrated "all time great" of all time. For all the counting stats he accrued by hogging all the usage in years where his team had zero shot at a title (4 seasons at 35% or higher, compared to Harden only doing it the past 2yrs), you would have expected him to be at least top 10 in win shares. But no. The man is #3 all time in points, ahead of MJ, but only #18 all time in win shares, about to be passed up by Chris Paul end of this year or early next.

This means that, perhaps more than anyone ever, a disproportionate amount of his value in contributing to winning was based on his points scored. The rest is reputation. He's got the highlight high degree of difficulty fadeaways, the highlight defensive stops, but the numbers don't support him being an all-time great defender. The years he won the championship he had either Shaq (#12 all time win shares) or Pau (#30) + Odom (#170) helping him out.

Yeah he was always the guy who imitated Michael and wanted to be the person to put the dagger in the opponent's heart...but so is Austin Rivers. Hitting clutch shots, talking **** all the way down the court the other way. That doesn't make him a top 5 player. An objective observer would have him in the 15-20 range for all time players, just like his win shares say. Both Chris Paul AND Harden will outshine him in the end, rings be damned. He's the rich man's Westbrook.

TMac and Iverson both also had their faults, and the stats also bear this out. Iverson benefited hugely from playing in the inferior East for much of his career. When we look back at the 2000's fifty years from now, we will see that it really was the decade of Duncan, Shaq, KG, early Lebron, Dirk...and then Kobe. Efficiency matters because it translates into winning. In this reddit youtube snapchat highlight world we live in, some people tend to overlook this fact.

 

T-Mac’s 02-03 season was pretty efficient for his time...the dude had all the talent in the world

an efficient 32 ppg at the age of 23...it really is a shame what happened to him

Orlando T-Mac is 1 of my favorite players of all time and had the most aesthetically pleasing game IMO...so smooth and made it look so easy

 

Some people actually thought it was a negative. That #8 could have been used to draft Rudy Gay (thus it was coined the Battier-Gay trade). Lots of people calling for the head of CD-Morey for missing out on Gay.

Rudy Gay turned out to be one of the most inefficient scorers who never amounted to the stardom many expected. Battier on the other hand gave us some solid years as a good complementary player.

 

I think there is no word for being lazy as a pro player because it's nothing like being lazy as a normal dude.

Maybe there are only couple of players really being lazy on a pro team in NBA history.

Everyone had to work hard to get to the NBA and stay there more than one or 2 years.

Ppl who have little clue are tossing the terms 'lazy' 'quitter' 'locker room distraction' ..... way too easily.

 

Nobody denies he has the talent
His work ethic
His leadership
and his laziness to settle for pull up 3s

This is not the same as Harden doing his step back, his step back is his go to move
Tmac could attack the basket like Kobe, but he only does it occasionally

When we finally got an offense that involved everybody , Rick Adelman's motion offense, we saw Carl Landry, Lowry, Scola etc step up and play really well. That was because it wasn't completely dependent on T-mac and Yao.

Tmac didn't like that.
That's what happened at the Toronto game , he wanted his teammates to give him the ball all the time

 

Tfraud admited he never worked hard enough to get the most out of his body a while back

 

Clutchfans remembers

 

Clutchfans memory is pure

 

Agreed and the biggest reason for that lack of depth was the utter failure of Carroll Dawson to get any value from the 2000 and 2001 drafts. 5 first round picks were turned into Jason’s Collier and Eddie Griffin, neither of whom panned out as players nor were able to be traded (we didn’t pick up Collier’s 4th year and we released Griffin at the beginning of his 4th). The trade for Eddie Griffin especially stung, given the fact that the 2001 draft had legit NBA talent all the way until the end of the first round and we had 3 first round picks until we traded them for a known head case. The Rockets then compounded this mistake by not trading him after his first season (during which he played well for all of one month) when several teams offered legit players for him (over the years I’ve heard Rasheed Lewis and Shawn Marion).

If we had gotten two NBA caliber starters out of those 5 picks, we wouldn’t have been so gutted by the Francis for TMac trade. We wouldn’t have relied on washed up vets to fill out the lineup.