I guess it is getting to be time to fish or cut bait, find out if he can keep up, if he can....good for the organization. I hope for Tmac's sake and mostly the Rocket's sake, they are really cautious. DD
Agreed. 10-15 good games from Jan-Feb then jettison him at the deadline. No more Tmac threads (in the GARM at least) = Heaven.
Channel 2 news just showed McGrady answering a question about how he felt after practice. I don't have it word for word but he said something to the effect of "I felt pretty good... for the most part... but I still have a lot of work to do." He didn't look or sound confident while he was saying it.
“I told him, ‘We have to see you push through things, not like last year,’ ” Adelman said. “He has no pain. He has to push through. He certainly makes a huge difference on the court. Then you have two guys with him and Trevor with good size. They both make plays. We’ll just have to wait and see. “When he practices, he’s got to go out and push himself and try to do more physically than maybe in his mind he thinks he can do. Then it’s a matter of the consistency, day in, day out. It can’t be one day here. I don’t want one day (playing), two days off. When he goes out on the floor, we have to be pretty sure he’s going to go. We can’t do it the other way. We need consistency on this team.” ------------------------------------ Yikes that is some pretty harsh talk......
And not a day too soon. If I was McGrady's coach and my job was on the line daily (as most NBA coaches pretty much are), I'd be chewing him out hourly.
Tracy seems to get it too... “The key is for me to go out and play consistently, not go out and play one game and sit out the next couple games,” he said. “It (his participation Sunday) really wasn’t about how I was playing. It was about how I was moving.” Moving is the key..... DD
i think he just sounded tired of answering the same question 100 times a day since media day. I think at this point he's not going to feel significantly different within a span of a few days, unless he re-injures himself. Other than that, he's gonna need weeks to know how his knee handled this new stress.
A few things to keep in mind while trying to sort through the different info coming from various sources: 1) McGrady's microfracture surgery was reported as being not as extensive as most athlete microfracture surgeries are. 2) John Stockton was playing just a few months after his microfracture surgery, at a much older age than T-Mac. 3) All reports are that T-Mac was very diligent about his rehab and worked his butt off under one of the best trainers available. 4) Doctors usually exaggerate the recovery time, or at least concentrate on the outside part of the range, due to liability issues. It sounds to me like Tracy could probably start practicing with the team now and work up to full practices, considering his supposedly grueling rehab work. No way the Rockets allow him to do that, though, because if something were to happen to that knee, there would be caca flying all over the place. My guess is they'll use him during training camp just enough so that the other players (especially the newbs) can get a feel for working with him in RA's system. Otherwise, there's really no point in T-Mac playing in games that don't count. Toward the end of camp, he'll probably start practicing more and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see him getting 20 minutes a game by mid- to late-November, regardless of this 11/23 deadline. I could be wrong, though. It happens to DaDakota all the time.
What do you mean when you refer to the scar tissue? Scar tissue is what forms after the healing process...but most of that, if not all, should have been broken up by the massage therapy he received constantly with Grover. the MRI could possibly show something. Let's pretend these practices start to slowly tear something up inside the knee. It may be weeks before it finally goes out completely and/or he feels the pain from it. So the MRI in Nov would just be to inspect the knee completely and make sure nothing started going wrong.
The fact that there's another MRI scheduled is telling in this case.. It can only mean two things: 1) The last MRI wasn't completely ok, so they decided to give it a month till it was perfect. or 2) The last MRI was ok. They wanted him to go through light practices (such as this one) and see how his body would respond and also get an MRI to confirm that light practices did not impact his rehab. As far as I'm concerned, any of those two situations is fine. Basically, I thinkwhat's happening is that he was told he can muck around with the practice schedule up until November 23rd/ They would rather he didn't practice. But come 23 November, if the MRI is perfect, there's no reason for him NOT to give it 100%. They are basically putting him on the spot saying "We expect you to practice full throttle after November 23rd if your MRI is ok. Whatever you do between now and then is upto you, but we will compare your MRI results and if anything is wrong, we will hold you responsible for not taking our medical advice of sitting out completely till then." I think it's good. They want to hold him accountable from now till the 23rd. Make him responsible for himself. After that, they want to push all the BS out of the way and expect him to practice like the rest of his hardworking team. I think this is a win-win for Tracy and the Rockets. We all know that Brooks is not a great passer and Ariza/Scola are not very good at handling the ball. T-Mac can definitely make Brooks/Ariza/Scola click.
exactly. the planned MRI (which could be earlier than that date depending on how tracy improves in practices) is basically to confirm if his knee can withstand the rigors of the practices (long practices a day, on consecutive days...). if the MRI has been showing progress like it has, he'll probably be ready to play. if the MRI shows something bad, we'll know b/c he won't be playing.
