In T-Mac's Defense - Perfecting the Upset's current article

If im not mistaken the doctor said that they missed some non cartilage area in his knee in the initial diagnosis..there was an article on it just google it

The rockets doctors told him his knee was fine and it would get better if he played on it which wasnt true.

 

The Rockets doctors said he just needed to keep playing and he will be fine. That was their stance all year.

 

Out of every asinine rehash of previously covered topics in this thread, this post made me laugh out loud.

 

Man if only Yao/Tracy held up like Kobe/Shaq, we would be so freaking stacked right now.

 

Yea man, its so sad, T-Mac started declining when he was like 27 seriously, that is horrible, you would expect him to fall off slowly, but not that far!

Same with Yao, both of them just got derailed by injuries which is sickening.

Both are great human beings, and I guess bad things happen to the great human beings!

They should still be effective today with respectable ages, imagine them with these role players!

 

Wow you have selective memory. Tmac's first 3 doctors said he was fine and didn't need that elective surgery. It wasn't until his fourth doctor, who is known for pushing that type of surgery, that he decided that he would get surgery... and for some reason right around the time Houston was looking to trade him... Strange?...

 

Yup, T-Mac got microfacture surgery and ruined his career just to **** with the Rockets.

Of course.

/sarcasm

 

I'd like to say T-Mac was the best Rocket since Hakeem retired. Now lets give the legend some credit.

 

You all should watch the movie 'Dilemma' and how Vince Vaughn is handling things
This turns out to be quite a show
Tracy was a gifted player, not a franchise player, but a good to great 2nd option, sorry for my guy Yao that he could not be that no. 1 guy.
The way Tracy was handling things did suck and the organization was not always supporting its players.
So actually the outcome is logical.

 

How would you have handled it in your "proper" way?

T-Mac is truly a franchise player. He was among the best players in the NBA during his younger days. Now, yeah, he's not a franchise player.

 

I completely disagree. T-Mac was the number 1 guy. Yao was the 2nd option.

This is not Kobe - Shaq.

Yao was never a top 5 player in the NBA. If we look at it completely honestly maybe he was top 10 for a little bit before he was injured.

T-Mac was clearly better. There is no way you take Yao over prime T-Mac in a basketball perspective.

 

I don't want to flame anyone, but T-Mac had no supporting cast apart from Yao. I really can't see how you can fault him for that. LeBron didn't win any more rings than T-Mac and LeBron didn't have Yao to slow the game down.

 

Agreed.

I mean, T-Mac was the arguably the best player in the NBA during from his Orlando days and all the way up to the end of the 2005 season, after which he had his first major injury.

Back then the talk was, T-Mac vs Kobe. Now when people bring these two names up, they instantly say, oh if T-Mac had the heart of Kobe he would have won.

Lets not forget Kobe demanded a trade, forced one of the all-time great Centers in the history of NBA out of the team, among many other similar things.

Because he won 5 rings, Kobe gets an easy pass for everything he had done.

People can only use the "lack of heart", "did not get past the 1st round" argument to bash T-Mac. When thats the only way you get hated on, you can say you've done a very well done job indeed.

 

I agree. But please also see my post below.

 

However, I would point to the lack of supporting cast as the number 1 problem of the T-Mac/Yao era.

Injuries are hard to manage, but good players are much more manageable.

One of the things that really ticked me off was, we were doing salary dump trades during our golden days of T-Mac/Yao. I mean, I don't want to get angry about those things any more because its all thoroughly tucked up in the past, but I mean, I can't help but get disappointed when we were trying to dump Stromile Swift's salary when that time was literally one of the times where you really shouldn't be frugal.

Lets start with 2004.

T-Mac arrives.

From then until 2008, when T-Mac was still very effective.

-Did we buy a single draft pick?
-What kind of salaries did we take on, (if we took on any at all)?
-What free agents did we sign?
-Why were we not able to address the PG situation for all of the 4 years?
-Was defense really a problem? Battier was really necessary?
-How many contract extensions did we give out, if at all? Does the notion that players/coaches/staff will play for personal gains rather than sacrificing for the team when their future is uncertain ever become part of the management's considerations?
-Why was the security and the future of the players and coaches not secured? Mike D'Antoni's assistants were all renewed just yesterday, and how have they achieved compared to van Gundy and Thibodeau?
-Why was the General Manager of the franchise changed in the middle of the hottest period of championship runs?
-Was stats really going to elevate T-Mac and Yao, if at all? (Not hating on Morey here, but transformation during the middle of a championship run was certainly not ideal)
-Was a finding that elusive stretch 4 really the ultimate goal for the franchise for the entire era?
-Why did we emphasis on defense SO much? We Hayes and Battier starting. Was that the original goal or perhaps unintentional?
-Was the goal to win or more about turning in a profit for the ownership?

I just think that the entire sequence of events is entirely being blamed on T-Mac and Yao. And that is only because we have no one else to blame, so we blame it on the people "who is supposed to carry us to a championship".

It goes like this:

Dawson is a great GM in my mind and everyone here's minds. But if we were to look at the period after the T-Mac trade to when he was fired, how were his achievements then? I would say quite average. But I still thank him wholeheartedly for bringing T-Mac here. One, its because T-Mac is my favorite player. Second, Francis-Mobley-Yao was never going to work.

Let's not say what T-Mac shoulda, woulda, coulda, have done for the franchise. Lets look at what he actually did achieve. Lets look at his contributions to the team in a vacuum. His playoff performances were stunningly stellar.

So I hear you say, "he's lazy".

So you think he should have "worked harder", and if he "worked harder" and we didn't beat the Jazz and win a championship, you'd have praised him?

No, I did not think so.

So lets look at the positives of T-Mac, and not the "negatives" thats been mentioned from time to time.







The man didn't have Ron Artest to win him a ring when he goes for 8-24 in Game 7.

 

No, he got microfracture surgery because he couldn't just play through the pain like everyone told him to. He elected to jeopardize his career because he was making $20 mil sitting on his ass. The guy had great moments and flashes of brilliance, but at the same token he just didn't have what it takes to win. Pain is part of the game.

 

So he played through the pain for 3/4 of the season, and the pain never subsided one bit unless he took one of his infamous breaks during the season.

There were 2 options: sit out the entire season with no surgery and just rest, or get another opinion.

 

I agree that T-Mac was our number 1 guy, not out of leadership but rather by default, since we had no other number 1.

I have criticized Yao a lot, but come on... really? Yao may not have been a top 10 player, but he was certainly a top 10 player. How many bigs do you know consistently averaged pretty much 20-10 with over 50% FG and 80% FT while healthy? You know of that guy called Dirk? If Yao was healthy, there is no question he is a top 10 talent and max contract player.

T-Mac was a better basketball player, but assuming that Yao could have stayed healthy, there is no way in hell I would have taken T-Mac over Yao. Yao is hard working, personable to the media, and an actually talented big.

 

Forgot to finish thought on Dirk: He did that once in his career!

 

You don't think the first 3 opinions were right? If you're looking for something, eventually a doctor will say you need it or have it...

Played through the pain? More like showed up from time to time.