Tracy this is FRUSTRATING. If you want 3 Weeks, USE THEM.

so who?

seriously, jeopardizing a career on around the horn? you do know stephen A smith has a job at ESPN right? kornheiser?

paige has a spot on around the horn b/c he's opinionated AND funny. i love whenever he opens his mouth b/c whatever he says is usually garbage that is unsubstantiated.

and i ask you AGAIN: why didn't that chron reporter write an article about it? that's his team in his city. that was something fans would want to know if that was indeed the case.

but there's no article? gee, i wonder why.

 

If Paige is discovered lying about anything in his role as a journalist he'll be disgraced and fired, not only from ESPN but also from his job at the Denver Post. In other words you're claiming that he's lying despite the fact that if he's found out it could ruin his career. Why exactly is he going to lie about T-Mac? What's his motivation?

As for the Chronicle guy, I'm guessing the reason he didn't write an article is that the Rockets players he spoke to did so off the record.

 

just heard ron artest is going to miss the next two games due to damaged ligaments in his ankle...................... here we go again

 

Hey you all Mac knows he is damn if he do damn if he don't.....Hopefully he is mentally fine that is what you all need to hope for

 

that has been a known thing for the last week.....he played on the ankle the other night knowing this.....also said that it is not nothing out of the normal for a 29 year old athelete's ankle to look the way his was looking on an MRI...Nothing to alarm yourself about

 

He is telling you right about Paige....he is not a journalist anymore he is basically Peter Vecesy now and before long he will find it hard to find work in his field of work.....Paige has always said since I have been watching him my sources or he has talked to somebody who has told him this or that, so take it for what it is worth

 

Big difference though.

Luther Head gets bashed in game threads or thread that has something to do with him. I don't agree with it though, I don't think he is nearly as bad as this board makes him out to be.

But T-mac gets bashed in a lot of threads that has nothing to do with him.

 

My question is why Yao doesn't get bashed or even Battier now? Yao seems to miss a bulk of games the last 2 years and Battier took a little longer this year to come back and he is still hurting and limping now.....BUT no one bashes them the way Mac gets bashed....Me personally I don't want neither one of our players to get bashed...what happend we ride together we die together or we win as a team we lose as a team

 

Paige isn't saying some guy told him, he's saying a Chronicle writer told him and he gave enough details that it's possible to figure out which Chronicle writer.

Again, it's not really an "anonymous" source.

 

I think if Yao missed about 5 games people would bash him, but he's only missed 1. Yao gets unfairly bashed too on here.

 

I think T-Mac comes in for a lot of unfair criticism.

But he also genuinely deserves a lot of the criticism he gets here and in the sports media. A lot of guys who post here really know what they're talking about and when they criticize McGrady it says something.

 

the level of frustration with yao missing games is less b/c we have proven we can play without him and play at a high level. same with battier.

we won 60+% of our games without yao the past 2 years.
we went 10-5 (66%) without battier the first 15 games.

but we only went 4-3 without tracy (and needed a big comeback to beat the hawks) during the easiest stretch of our schedule. last year we went 7-4 but we faced the knicks and wolves 4 times during that stretch.

the thing is we depend on tracy A LOT. so if he goes out, our record will not be as good and as fans, they get frustrated. that's a fair gripe they can have with tracy.

i mean if tracy plays all 82 games, we probably win 55+ games every year and get a top 2-3 seed. but he doesn't.

that's a legit gripe.

 

I agree he does deserve a lot of criticism I just think people tend to make big deals out of everything he does. Like when people complain about him smiling after a loss even though every player does it, or people complaining about how he reacts while sitting on the bench.

But this board tends to overreact on every single player especially after a loss.

 

I think most of the anger at T-Mac here and elsewhere is rooted in the belief that he's mentally weak. The "Pay for no play" ticker at the Chronicle for example.

 

The smiling thing has to be viewed as one piece of a bigger picture though. If Artest was caught smiling after a loss nobody here would care.

With McGrady though there's a percept that his heart/intensity/desire is seriously lacking. When that's already the case the smiling after a loss is just the straw that broke the camel's back.

 

that's only a part of it. fans had high hopes of getting a 2 seed or even challenging the lakers to start the year.

our record without tracy is borderline ludicrous. that's why fans get frustrated.

i mean, if tracy had a season-ending surgery, what would be the reaction as compared to yao's season-ending surgery?

 

no, or it's people looking into things too much to find things to hate tracy.

i mean, really, there is a thread dedicated to his lack of "cheering" on the bench. and yet that OP ignored the fact that tracy talked/motivated/cheered on yao as he came back to the bench.

it's beyond whatever heart/intensity/desire of tracy. what tracy did last yr for this team should erase most of that. but it didn't. so that's not the problem.

 

There was an awful lot of noise last year that the team looked better without McGrady--when Woody Paige made his T-Mac as ball hog comment on "Around the Horn" it was during T-Mac's absence last year, when Magic and the rest of the TNT crew were talking about how the offense looked better when McGrady say.

 

Again, go back and read emjohn's post. Questions about McGrady's desire have dogged him since his Orlando days. In other words it should be pretty clear that those questions didn't get started in Houston.

When you've got a reputation people will see your behavior in light of that reputation. That's the heart of those smiling/cheering threads.

 

He is lacking strength...Mental strength that is.