The only reason McGrady no longer fits is because Yao is no longer there. If Yao were here we would be playing a slower tempo and tracy would still fit, that is if he wouldn't have been a punk and nixed a trade at the deadline.
Um..... .....might I say something to you here, pdewalt? You're one of the people here who've steadfastly sought to be impartial, at least, in your views on Tracy McGrady. It's obvious to me from this post of yours that the developments regarding McGrady and the Rockets have you more than a little perturbed. I've felt the same way, only because I've never been a proponent of shell games by anybody in the Rockets organization. You're right about the perceptions regarding McGrady, in my opinion. Nothing that he says, does, doesn't say or doesn't do, would move anybody with any predisposed ideas about McGrady's character or heart to an honest review of him under whatever circumstances are present. Fran Blinebury did a piece for the Houston Chronicle before he left, excoriating McGrady for answering a question about those pain-killing injections he was taking on that infamous knee that nobody here wants to admit was causing him problems. Blinebury felt that McGrady was whining too much about his need to have those injections just to be on the court. Blinebury went on to say how he spent time in locker rooms with Julius Erving and Patrick Ewing, among other players, who constantly had ice bags on their knees and never said a word about it. I always enjoyed Fran's columns, personally. He could be scathing, even cruel, particularly where McGrady was concerned. But I never felt he was unfair. He had perspective and access, to me, that granted his commentaries a lot of weight, whether I agreed with them or not. But his mind was made up about McGrady, almost as soon as he arrived. Blinebury felt that McGrady was worthless (and that's kinder than he ever referenced McGrady). Nothing would change his mind on that. Even when Fran commented on a satisfactory performance of his, it was a back-handed slap at McGrady. Nothing McGrady did or didn't do was seen as anything other than contemptible. It's to your credit that you're sympathetic to McGrady (who doesn't need sympathy from anyone—he's a professional and gets paid well enough to ignore praise and criticism and develop his own drive to excel at his job).....but I think you need to let this, and McGrady, go, friend. .....that game in Toronto will forever ride along with many Rockets fans in regards to McGrady because the paint was already drying on the wall. No matter what happened or why, McGrady would be taken to task for it. That's only the cost of doing business, even if it's not totally fair or accurate. McGrady had already been labeled as a player who would not come through when you need him. He would fail at the most inopportune (but consistently predictable) time. He wasn't anything more than a monumental waste of time and talent, who was always trawling around bottom-feeding, looking for any way he could to dash hopes and undermine plans and crush dreams. McGrady doesn't care about anybody but himself. And as soon as the going got tough, he'd get going. Right out the nearest exit. I don't think it would have been possible for McGrady to lose the city of Houston if he ever really had it in the first place. Even if he had not set foot on that court in Toronto that night, McGrady would have left his teammates "four on five" in most people's eyes. There was never any way for McGrady to win in that situation. He never has won anything, anyway, so I suppose things happened as they only could have. The facts surrounding McGrady's knee were never going to be seen clearly or objectively by anyone, because of so many predisposed notions about what kind of person McGrady is. Something I'd liken to crying wolf once too often (there are still those who still believe McGrady's back problems were ruses to get out of playing)....... That's terrible to me. McGrady's failed so miserably as a player and person that no one will see an honest fact in regards to his injury. McGrady injured that knee early in that 2007-2008 season. That initial injury caused the lesion on his knee that eventually needed the surgery. Playing with that injury, and taking cortizone to ignore the pain it caused him even then, led to those loose bodies that the first surgery removed (the surgery that was a separate procedure altogether, and didn't correct the first problem, merely a by-product of not dealing with the larger problem). McGrady didn't rehab that injury properly, the story goes, which is why his knee didn't get any better. No amount of rehab, it seems, would have helped him if the problem wasn't fixed (like that joke of a diagnosis with Yao and his broken foot that only needed a walking boot to heal)..... ....but that just fed into the notion that McGrady was lazy and soft anyway, so why mess with what was working? Especially with McGrady willing to play along for awhile, thinking that he was going to help out on the court on one leg. The next season was McGrady's chance to win, finally. He had no more excuses. Ron Artest, a legitimate player, was on board. Yao was back. The young guys were a year better for their experience. Everybody expected a long title run. The stage was set. And wouldn't you know it.....McGrady swoops in to screw everything up for everybody. Just like clockwork. And just to pour salt in the wound, McGrady does an end-around on the brass and decides to have the surgery he always needed and everybody knew was needed, just to get out of being traded. Nobody mentions, of course, that if the Rockets want McGrady traded (short of him actually dying and being buried for three days), there was nothing at all McGrady could do about it. McGrady wasn't healthy enough to pass anybody's physical (trades have been rescinded because of hangnails and pink-eye, for Christsake), and anybody that had intentions of keeping him would have taken him regardless of the physical. Those things don't paint the right picture here, though, so we can't use those.... Nothing naive about believing what happened in front of everybody's eyes, pdewalt. Somehow, those guys managed to win when they weren't supposed to, back in 2008. Your problem was thinking that the winning had something to do with McGrady being there. You're using the wrong paint bucket again. Again, the idea is that it's not just one thing with McGrady. It's a lot of the same things, over and over and over again. None of it's pretty and none of it's good. To top it off, there's a lot of statistical evidence to support the notion that a consistent All-NBA player is somehow not as good as a bunch of unbiased sportswriters (who are probably all on record somewhere saying that McGrady is worthless and contemptible—even Fran Blinebury, for all his loathing of him, put McGrady on those All-NBA teams more than once)..... I think the best thing to understand here is that, at the end of the day, egos on both sides have brought this situation where it currently is, pdewalt. But the only person to blame, like always, is McGrady. Personally, I look forward to him moving on. If for no other reason than for people to find another whipping boy (Trevor Ariza doesn't count....he's not good enough to do anything other than what he's doing right now, so there's no fun in picking on him)......
Um.. there was something McGrady could do about the trade, have the surgery. That effectively killed the trade didnt it? if he didnt announce it, he'd be off to NJ already. you guys keep saying that it's all mcgrady's fault, but you guys never look at it from his standpoint. like you admitted yourself, tmac was injured. he felt that there's something wrong but nobody believed him. dm believed the doctors when they said that the pain isnt going away and he just has to play with it. well, what do you guys say now after the surgery? tmac is moving better, proving that there was an injury holding back. but again, what happened back then? DM didnt believe tmac. they kept playing him even when tmac said he cant play, thus all the in and out of the lineup brouhaha. still tmac cant play at the level that he's used to. sure, he probably quit during the toronto game but not because without a reason. he was injured but everybody ignored it. that was him saying that he cant play 100% and the team needed to play him right with his injury. and instead of your GM and your coach supporting you during your time of need, they shopped you behind your back. way i see it, DM felt that this was the year they could go all the way with artest on board and there was still a way to salvage the season. he knew he needed a scoring wing and vince carter fit that bill. he was amazing last season. so instead of helping out tmac, DM opted to ship him out. wasnt DM working for a contract last year? but even if he wasnt, his reputation was on the line. he gave up on some good rookies to get ron artest. it was supposed to be the year DM would show he's a genius. but tmac was ruining it all for him. now if you were tmac and you kept saying your injured and your GM and your coach asked you to play through the pain and that theyll work with you, but then you heard that a deal has already been sent to the league sending you to a deadend team? wouldnt you be pissed? that's betrayal. even if it's a business, id take it personally. for most of the season you risked your career playing on a injured knee and this is what you get? left with no other option, tmac decided to get that surgery he felt he needed all along. screw DM and RA. they werent looking out for me. they never had my back. they were looking out for themselves. time for me to look out for my own self. so would you go to RA and DM and tell them you're opting for the surgery? what do you think would happen then? DM would probably hurry up the trade and stop tmac from announcing the surgery and ship him out before the ***** hit the fan. but tmac did him one better by just telling the training staff and then went ahead with the announcement. was it selfish of him? well, he had the reason to be. DM sucks at handling people and situations. look at what he did to JVG. how about the landry contract situation? or steve francis? im sure if it werent for les, even yao wouldve been traded away. they would have kept the injury quiet and traded him during the offseason.
He said some intelligent things and he said some bs stuff, but overall I think he knows something is going to change. But nothing can be found right now. So it's a waiting game. In addition, I hate the whole talk of doesn't fit into our new style of play/system. What style is that? .500 ball?
Man, it'd be nice if they [DM & Rick] can take some of those feelings they have about Tracy and kind of shiiiiiiiiift them over to Ariza....just nudge em over... "the issue is that he did not fit into the style we're in now. he wanted to be a big minute player, but we just cant accomodate that with the way we need to play to compensate for the loss of Yao." Yeah...no more big minutes for Trev! Thanks for posting the DM interview and transcribing! Good info in there...
I'm sorry, engr_alex.... ...maybe you haven't gotten the memo that I'm a McGrady apologist. The point of my little tirade was to point out how totally wasteful it has always been to try to play PR games where Tracy McGrady is concerned, particularly during his time here in Houston. Virtually no one would believe that, at the very least, that McGrady was not able to play last season and that there should have been no onus to put him on the floor under those circumstances. I was one of the misguided people who said McGrady had absolutely no business playing at all last season if he wasn't healthy. Everybody in the organization trumpeted the idea that the time to win was now (2008-2009). The stars were aligned, we were told. Everything was in place. The mass hysteria around here got everybody wound up in things that had no way of being realized if the guys you were going to need were not going to be able to contribute. That's the same type of short-sightedness that Jeff Van Gundy suffered with during his time here. Let me emphasize—EVERYBODY in the organization KNEW all throughout the 2007-2008 season of the true nature of McGrady's injury. The merry-go-round some of these poor misguided fools ride around on....you know, the one where there was every doctor from here to Kalamazoo saying there was no change in McGrady's knee (which everybody leapt to the conclusion that there was no problem at all)...? That information was misinterpreted by fans and media, and not fully or accurately disclosed at the time by the organization (until later, when McGrady decided on surgery), into meaning that McGrady's arthoscopic surgery the prior summer was the only problem he had, and if he had bothered to rehab that injury properly (along with the shoulder he had problems with being operated on at the same time)..... ...then he wouldn't have come into the season hurting and scuttled the Rockets' chances to win a title, or even "quit" on that floor in Toronto.... All of these events "revealing" McGrady's character are what has me disgusted with the whole enterprise being suggested here. You're right....what was McGrady supposed to think or feel, when everyone concerned knows the extent of the problem he was having, and sought to ignore it because of an undue dependence on him for the team to even be competitive? McGrady, in his time as a Rocket, has been the perfect foil for every malady the Rockets have suffered, on the court and off the court. Some of those maladies have been McGrady's fault (particularly during games). Some of those maladies have been attached to him (bad team play...bad teammates...bad front office decisions).... ...but all of the blame and criticism goes to him, and him alone. That's business, I'm told. That would be called monkey business, if this were at the Houston Zoo. Tracy McGrady brings extraordinary expectations because of his extraordinary ability as a ballplayer. He is also very human, and that humanity oftentimes overshadows that ballplaying ability. McGrady isn't perfect, and doesn't do as good a job of hiding it as some people in the spotlight are capable of. He is too honest whenever he speaks, and too obvious in whatever he does. He is moody, tempermental, distant, and perhaps even aloof. I like McGrady well enough, but I wouldn't begin to tell myself I understand him. I certainly wouldn't base my judgement of his character solely on that one incident in Toronto with such weird circumstances precipitating it, anymore than I would judge him solely by a special six-week period in which he showed as much heart and character and maturity as any other player during that time on that winning streak they cobbled together. My feeling on this entire sorry episode is this—The Rockets were too preoccupied with winning more quickly than anything on their roster suggested at the time McGrady first suffered his injury. Yao and McGrady may have been ready to compete at a high level in the postseason, even if only for brief periods. But the rest of the roster was not. Rick Adelman and Daryl Morey both overhauled and improved the roster in the space of two seasons. Something believed to be nearly impossible because of the size of McGrady and Yao's contracts, but was actually felt to be unnecessary because of Yao and McGrady as players themselves. Just because the players around McGrady and Yao needed to improve or be replaced didn't adjust anyone's expectations for the team's success. When you have players like Yao or McGrady, nobody's going to accept that you need to build a team around them, and that it would take some time for that to happen, and that those guys around Yao and McGrady have to be playing as well as those two are at playoff time if you expect to win and advance. Especially not around here, where so much time was already wasted ignoring the rest of the roster. That rationale just wasn't going to hold water. Especially because of McGrady's playoff history. Yao and McGrady are both too easy to blame when the team fails, for a lot of different reasons. But when you shake it all out, it comes down to winning and losing. "Winning is a great deodorant," John Madden likes to say. It makes no sense for anybody in the organization to believe that McGrady wasn't injured when everyone knew he was. Daryl Morey isn't that stupid, and neither is Rick Adelman. They all rolled the dice (Morey, Adelman, McGrady, the doctors, the training staff, everybody) on a balky knee, and they had the perfect guy (who everybody questions and dislikes and is ready to crucify anyway) to hold the bag for it when it didn't work. They did the same thing with Yao's foot, after they all found a hairline fracture in it after last season's playoffs and decided to let Yao gallavant around China in a walking boot (with his injury history)...! The only thing Yao has over McGrady is that everybody likes him. For a guy who everyone says does everything for his own self-promotion, McGrady is horrible at making himself look good in front of the press. As long as he's been a teammate of Shane Battier's, I'd have thought he'd figured out how to do that stuff by now. The Rockets, for all I know, may have been ready to part ways with McGrady as early as the start of the 2008 season, Ron Artest or no Ron Artest. So what? How the devil does parading McGrady around with an injury you KNOW is potentially career-ending (and an injury that even the Rockets doctors were marvelling at McGrady's ability to play with, albeit sporadically) do any good for anyone concerned in any fashion? None of McGrady's teammates, it seems, believed he was injured (partly because McGrady is so gifted physically, he could look the part from time to time), so they came to distrust him.... ....every doctor is saying he's fine when they KNOW he isn't.....McGrady gives his best effort and still is publicly flogged and the organization distances itself from him like he was solely responsible for it...... ....as I've said, there's more than enough blame to go around, if people are into that sort of thing. To my thinking, there was no commitment on either side to set a realistic timetable for (1) the team to improve and develop (sort of like what we're seeing this season), and (2) getting and keeping the guys you need and rely on healthy enough to be what you need and expect them to be. I don't fault Daryl Morey in any motivations he had or has in regards to the team. I don't care if there's the feeling that both parties (McGrady and management), have hit each other in the face with cream pies. But if there's a standard that McGrady is held to behaviorially (rightfully), then the GM and coach should be held to that standard, too. This season, out of necessity, they tendered the expectations because now, there's no fallback of McGrady or Yao, buying themselves some time to improve the team without being burned at the stake because the results wouldn't net a lot of winning. That should have been done as soon as Adelman was hired. But like any coach, he plays the guys who give him the best chance to win. Adelman had McGrady play in pain for the better part of two seasons, figuring that winning was more important than anything else, and a partial McGrady was preferable to anything else he had. Now, a partial McGrady stunts player growth and keeps the team from winning and is getting his just desserts for his "behavior" last season, all under the guise of "developing" the team. Please. And having the surgery didn't kill the trade (if there was one) in any meaningful way. There's this idiotic thinking that everybody's keeping secrets from everybody else....that we know things about players that we're trying to move that nobody else around the league knows....that somehow, there's something about Tracy McGrady that we can keep the rest of the league from finding out about after 13 seasons...... ....the only thing sillier than that is pretending that this whole enterprise has been anything other than pettiness and selfishness. From both sides. It's not management's decision to move McGrady or move on from him that bothers me at all, engr_alex. It's how it was attempted. You freeze out a player who worsened an injury on your clock and at your direction because his surgery sabotaged a trade you had cooking? Seriously? As if you could keep the details of McGrady's injury secret from the trade partner? As if the injury itself wouldn't have killed the trade? As if the partner, if you misrepresented the goods, wouldn't cry foul and toilet the trade? As if the league itself would have approved it if you tried to pass McGrady off as healthy when he wasn't? If you really want him traded, you can trade him, injury or no injury, if you let the partner know what's really going on with him, and they want whatever benefit the trade may offer for themselves. That's what these geniuses are suggesting around here. That McGrady singlehandedly outsmarted guys whose job it is to know more about the business than the employees. Personally, I don't think that's what happened at all. But then, I thought maybe McGrady's injury was in his head for awhile. Shows what I know. I still think very highly of Daryl Morey, Rick Adelman and Tracy McGrady. Unfortunately, they don't seem to think very highly of one another.....
Mdrowe00, you could say that I'm a little perturbed. :grin: Before I start, I did rep you for this post. I thought that you made some great points but I've never stated that the wins in 2008 were because of Mr. In-Exile. All season long I felt that this team minus Yao would have been the best team he would have been on or at least role players. For whatever reason(s), that opportunity is lost. I will only address two areas that I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page, out of respect to your comments. I agree with your points on him being perceived as the NBA equivalent of "Peter Wolf" by most people. And I also agree with you that blame should fall on both sides, if I understood you correctly. My issue has always been something was very fishy about how things were being handled by the organization. For possibly the reasons that you have mentioned, there is a tendency to take everything the org says as the gospel concerning Mr. In-Exile. That has always concerned me as well, especially since, as you have stated that, this is a business and referenced this idea of a shell game. As far as the lesion injury goes, there isn't any rehab method that would actually fix that besides microfracture surgery or this other cartilage replacement procedure (long story, but would more invasive than microfracture) unless the physician that performed my surgeries forgot to tell me. You can strengthen the areas around the knee but it doesn't fill/fix the hole which is what a lesion is (didn't mean to come across condescending here). I am not sure where people have gotten this "he didn't rehab properly" from other than the "Peter Wolf" label. How does one rehab a hole in your knee's cartilage? Because I rehabbed prior to surgery and it didn't prevent the pain and/or symptoms from the lesions. And as I mentioned to Clutch, I think there were people in this city that he won over and still hasn't lost as that generalization would lead us to believe. I wouldn't dare say the entire city hates or loves him because some people in this city are often very fickle. Some people even turned on Hakeem and now he's darn near idolized. Mdrowe00, nice post (BTW, I'm not a fan of Blinebury and/or Justice).
I must say that this was one of the best arguments that I have ever read or written on here. I truly enjoyed reading it!!! Putting aside the topic, this is what makes the garm worth reading, when people are critical in stating their positions. I can respect it and them whether or not I agree.
Thanks, pdewalt. You don't do a bad job posting here, yourself. To tell the truth, very few people here don't routinely do very good jobs with their information, opinions and insights. Again, my feeling is that, if the idea was to move McGrady from as soon as the beginning of the '08-09 season, it made absolutely no sense at all to not communicate that to McGrady directly. If anything, it may have made the process a little more tolerable for everybody. I mean, if you believe all those well-informed, then Daryl Morey and Rick Adelman were already done with McGrady anyway. The way I've seen the large majority of trades and trade rumors handled, usually the players actively being shopped (like Amare Stoudemire in Phoenix, for example), can usually handle it if they understand directly the reasoning for it. It's not (nor has it ever been) about two sides not being able to agree. Everybody will have different motivations in a professional business. That people, again, latch onto that fact as a way to horse-whip McGrady because of contempt for him personally, seems to be par for the course. It's about being upfront about those differences, and working out something that's best for all parties concerned. Too bad that this whole ballroom waltz by everyone, trying to outmanuever a lamppost, has left this kind of stink around here..... ....and even exiling McGrady hasn't completely lifted the smell, either.....
First I would like to add that I have seen three posters in this thread express themselves in manners in which I haven't seen in a very long time. It was refreshing to read these posts even though they were long because they were indeed so well written and though provoking. I have been a Rockets fan for a very long time. I feel no sense of committment to TMac, even slightly. What I have always maintained though was some of the same lines of thinking I have seen posted in this thread. What if you were McGrady. What if the team did know you were truely injured but wanted you to try due to the Artest signing combined with Yao and TMac. Through in a steal of Scola, Landry's fine play and no one couldn't think that the Rockets weren't at very least a serious contended last year. So McGrady does try to play, but isn't very successful. No could ever look at that dunk attempt that he flopped so badly and think that what the Rockets were saying about his knee being ok that he only needed to play through the pain was entirely true. What if for all that you found out you were being shopped to the Nets of all places? How would you feel? I really don't care what happens to McGrady. Honestly I just want our organization to be straight with the fans. If you got caught doing wrong to Tmac and he made the first move then just shut up and move on. Instead I can't help feeling that claims of "doesn't fit", "we don't have the minutes", "not fully healed" are likened to the excuse making child after they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. To be perfectly honest with you, IF the deal was to bring Carter to Houston, then realistically shouldn't we all be happy it didn't pan out that way? I mean look what VC has done to Orlando with another great big man, a quick explosive PG and a solid PF. Do we honestly think that having VC for the next few years would of been a good thing? Even though we played the Lakers tough for 7 games, doesn't mean it would of panned out that way if VC were here. In the big picture I feel our organization, coach and GM look real bad in this situation. Free Agents will take notice to this appaling ordeal in the future. This isn't like Scottie Pippen when he just popped off at the mouth taking swipes at Hall of Famers and an organization. If the Rockets were caught by TMac, then why all the disdain? Why give him 7 mins a game? At very least let him back and if you want to continue to shop him for the trade deadline then so be it. We move on and no one looks bad. Instead we have this ugly situation were we have a coach playing Ariza massive minutes, who is completely failing yet TMac doesn't fit? Seriously? Thats our claim? No one thinks this is a terrible argument to not let him play? To all the TMac bashers. Get over it. You don't know the behind the scenes, and it might turn out that in the end some of these posters were right about what really happened.
A course.he knows what he's doing.and so does RA.RA would have the nets in the playoffs.i think the guy is that good.don't let what happening this year fool you.
