Tracy McGrady was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017. He was a great, great player who in his prime was virtually unstoppable as a scorer. There’s no need to burnish his legacy, because his place in history is already secure. For some reason though, it seems not a week can go by these days without hearing another tall tale about what T-Mac could have done.
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If T-Mac had achieved all of the hypotheticals floating around, he’d be one of the greatest players of all time. There’s been much discussion lately about how he’d have won three straight titles on the Lakers if he was on the team instead of Kobe Bryant. Bizarrely, Shaq even agreed with it, despite McGrady never even making it out of the first round of the playoffs until his final season with the Spurs, when he barely played.
McGrady appeared on the most recent episode of The Arena podcast, where he reminisced about the time he hung 62 points on Gilbert Arenas and his Wizards. That’s an incredible feat, something that has happened less than 50 times in NBA history. Arenas thought it could have been even better though, because McGrady fell off in the fourth quarter.
“I remember going back to the locker room and I was like, ‘He wasn’t even on fire,'” Arenas said. “No I was not,” McGrady agreed. “I was mad at myself! I missed nine free throws, and I missed 10 of my last 11 shots.”
Incredibly, they’re telling the truth. McGrady scored 62 on 20-37 shooting from the field while going 17-26 from the line. In the fourth quarter, he was only 1-6 from the floor, and that doesn’t include all the misses that occurred when he got fouled. He was also 8-11 from the line in those final 12 minutes.
Arenas said, “He was supposed to have like 80, 90 here,” and yeah, if McGrady had stayed hot, he could have hit a number like that.
It’s completely fair for McGrady to lament the fact that his shooting tailed off at the end. It’s also completely understandable, given the workload he had taken on in that game, that he may have worn down by the end.
What isn’t quite as fair is that McGrady claimed that if Kobe had already scored his 81 (he wouldn’t do that for another 22 months or so), he would have been able to put up a bigger number himself.
“This was before the 81,” McGrady said. “If [Kobe] had the 81, maaaaan, I probably would have locked in a little bit.”
Why diminish such an awesome accomplishment by implying that you weren’t fully focused on the task at hand? It can be rather been frustrating watching T-Mac continue to run what maybe referred to as revisionist history, because it’s so unnecessary.
He was an outstanding player and shouldn’t feel the need to prop himself up, especially for an accomplishment that so few players have achieved in the first place.
