um, if you're that naive, go look at the timeline of all the tmac's rumors this year. they ALL started on TNT my friend. read the dates of all those articles and when barkley and magic made their proclamations.
and one more thing badgerfan, tmac's criticisms all stem from his playoff failures. so you an say anything b/c he hasn't won. kobe HAS won, and yet he still gets those criticisms (selfish, bad teammate, bad guy to coach). why do you think so? shouldn't criticisms go away when you win (or the bad ones)?
So Paige says he got this from some guy at the Chronicle, who got it from the Rockets themselves. Which party in that chain do you think is lying?
Uh, no. If you play badly it doesn't matter if you get to the Finals--you still played badly. T-Mac's shot selection is atrocious a lot of times. That's in both the regular season and the playoffs, in wins and in losses.
It could be the things that bugs you about T-Mac are really blown out of proportion and folks that really know basketball(without biases such as amount of money a player makes or how many tattoos he has) have no problem seeing how much the good outweighs the bad. By a significant margin. McGrady's only real issues are shooting the basketball and concentration. Thing is, his concentration is most an issue when shooting free throws. As for the ball stopper stuff, didnt that start with Barkley?? I think alot of folks regurgitate the same things they hear elsewhere, and all of a sudden its all over the league.
His shot selection is not much worse if all than Kobe Bryant's or any of the other wings that dominate the ball as much.(JRich, Lebron James, Joe Johnson, Jamal Crawford). If T-Mac was a better finisher around the basket, his FG% would be on par with all of those, even Kobe and Lebron.
go watch any star (even good all-stars) and look at their shot selection. broaden your NBA watching and you'll see tmac's shot selection is pretty damn good (if he can just hit his fts and finish around the rim better).
if you want to get technical, they do. did you see the game winner kobe took against detroit? he had 7 seconds and down by 2 but settled for a 28 footer. lebron took a deep 3 and airballed it (remember that wiz game in the reg. season) when it was single coverage and only down by 2. oh, only tmac does those things
I'd have to disagree. When you do you see those guys jacking up heat check 3's from the parking lot? What's really questionable is when they're contested. Anyway, it's twice as bad on the Rockets. This team works when the offense is patient, takes its time, moves the ball and gets the open shot--even if that means playing deep into the shot clock.
I don't know if it started with Barkley. Maybe it started with the Rockets, moved on to our anonymous Chronicle reporter, then to Woody Paige, then to Around the Horn, and then to Barkley. And like it or not a player's salary is a huge factor in determining how good the team as a whole can be. That should be obvioius. You overspend and you will not able to sign the same level of premium talent as your competitors who didn't sign bad contracts. Like it or not that's a huge question with McGrady--whether or not he provides value equal to his salary.
So good that guys like Doug Collins and the TNT guys are compelled to comment on how bad his shot selection can be at times?
i agree with you dude that he has bad selection. but what i'm trying to say is 99% of stars have bad shot selection b/c they are so confident. are you watching kobe, melo, and iverson right now? dudes stay jackin' bad shots all game. (kobe jacking a 35fter with 9 seconds left on the shot clock and melo giving him tons of space??? melo is just awful right now.) open up your eyes. thank god we have tmac right now. if those guys play like this on this team, we're done.
obviously you didn't watch much basketball during the reg. season. it ALL started with barkley on the ball-stopping comment. magic brought up that they should part with either tmac or barkley then the media comes out the next few days saying tmac is gonna be traded. you do know barkley and magic are part of the media now right?
so he can do that b/c his team is up. well how is his team up? he has a better team. but kobe takes those shots all the time if you watch them. he started out the game taking 2 of his first 3 shots as THREE POINT SHOTS. he has only penetrated the paint three times the whole game in a PLAYOFF game. what i'm trying to say is tmac is not hte only star that has bad shot selection. EVERY SINGLE STAR DOES. (melo is showing that as an example along with allen iverson tonight). and lemme point out - kobe is having a "decent" game and lakers up big. you think tmac can do that with this team?
I am actually wondering if T-mac will be a blubbering pile of goo when we put these JazzHoles away and goto the second round. Will he be on the podium whimpering and crying about how hard it was how it was all worth it how he can sleep at night knowing that the Jazzholes are at home and will be watching the rockets in the second round and how he can rest knowing that Stockton and malone . . .will get to watch the jazz not goto the second round and how he wishes he had a bud instead of a heinekin cause . . .rafers like bud! Rockets in 7! Rocket River
And how do you know that for a fact? Or are you just making stuff up? One more time: Paige said he heard it from a Chronicle reporter. The Chronicle reporter said he heard it from the Rockets. Is Paige lying? Or is the Chronicle reporter?
I'm watching the game with Iverson and Kobe. In the first half Kobe had a sweet little dish to Gasol at the foul line. Iverson had an open 12 footer. Odom turned his back on him because he assumed he was going to shoot it. Instead Iverson drove in and laid it in. I don't see either or those guys parked out behind the three point line, jacking up heat checks.
ask anyone on this board (and if they're willing to answer to your lack of knowledge b/c apparently they don't), and you would know all the tmac rumors started from TNT (specifically barkley and magic). paige and other media members then just took off on it. sam smith wrote 2 articles about how the rockets were actively trying to shop tmac hard and yet NOBODY on the chronicle wrote about it. NOBODY on the chronicle wrote about tmac being a ball-stopper. usually when REAL rumors start, the home team's newspaper will talk about it first. the chronicle wrote NOTHING about tmac being a ball-stopper nor him getting traded. not even ONE COLUMN or a single paragraph about it. how are you this naive?
