Sports is almost always about hope and regret.
Very occasionally the former is realized and the latter rendered irrelevant with a championship season.
On Saturday, Tracy McGrady was announced as a member of the latest class to be enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He is the first player drafted by the Toronto Raptors to earn the honour. If Vince Carter ever retires he will be the second.
And that’s all any Raptors fan needs to think about to spend the rest of day falling down a rabbit hole of ‘what ifs’ and ‘just-imagines’.
If it makes anyone feel any better, McGrady feels the same way.
“Something’s missing. Something’s missing,” he said to me in New Orleans at all-star weekend, when he was announced a Hall of Fame finalist. “Had I stayed in Toronto, I’m sure we would have done something special.”
Like win a championship. Like form the backbone of a potential dynasty. McGrady never won a playoff series, let alone a title. His Hall of Fame credentials are based on a stretch between 2000-08 – before injuries began to sap his super powers – when he was constantly in the conversation as one of the very best players in the sport. Usually his old teammate, Carter, was in the same sentence.
McGrady’s career is full of near misses. He was supposed to be part of another dynamic duo in Orlando, but Grant Hill’s ankle injuries derailed those possibilities. In Houston, Yao Ming’s foot problems and McGrady’s own struggles with back, knee and shoulder injuries meant the Rockets never reached their potential. McGrady figures the best team he was ever on was the 2008-09 Rockets club that won 53 games. McGrady played just 35 due to problems in his surgically repaired left knee.
But the idea of McGrady playing his prime in Toronto alongside Carter is a hard one for Raptors fans to shake.
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The current edition of the club is certainly the best team the franchise has ever had. Provided all-star point guard Kyle Lowry returns healthy and able from his wrist surgery and the club can quickly find the right chemistry – Lowry hasn’t even practised with newcomers Serge Ibaka and P.J. Tucker – there’s good reason to think they have the type of lineup that can make a legitimate push to the NBA Finals.
But there’s no debate that the best team the Raptors never had involved included McGrady and Carter, the pair of Florida-born high flyers who played two seasons together – just long enough to get a hint of their potential; their high-water mark a three-game first-round ouster at the hands of the New York Knicks in the spring of 2000.
It gets murky after that. McGrady was a free agent that summer and at age 21 made the decision to leave chilly Toronto for the warmth of Orlando. His new team was just up the road from his hometown of Auburndale, Fla., where he emerged from a near-unknown local phenom to a talent widely recognized enough to be drafted straight from high school – No. 9 overall by the Raptors – in the space of 12 months.
His star-crossed career took off after that.
For seven seasons between 2000-01 and 2006-07, split between the Orlando Magic and the Houston Rockets, McGrady averaged 26.9 points, 6.8 rebounds and 5.4 assists with 1.5 steals.
He was an all-star every year and an All-NBA performer for seven straight years. His 2002-03 season when he averaged 32.1/6.5/5.5 and 1.7 is one of the best all-around individual campaigns in league history. He is one of just nine players to have a single-season player efficiency rating of 30 or more, joining Wilt Chamberlain, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan, among others.
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Over those same seven years – with the Raptors and then with New Jersey – Carter averaged 24.3 points, 5.1 rebounds and 4.1 assists.
In the past 16 seasons the only teammates to ever hit those marks are James and Dwyane Wade with the Miami Heat in 2010-11.
So yeah, safe to assume Tracy and Vince, paired for their primes, could have done some work.
McGrady arrived in Toronto having just turned 18, in possession of a $3.9-million guaranteed rookie deal and an eye-popping – at the time – $12-million shoe deal with Adidas. One of his first expenditures was braces.
His talent was obvious even before he could assert himself regularly against men in the NBA. He had an impossibly rare combination of explosive athleticism, length and basketball IQ.
Looking back, what made him stand out in my eyes early on wasn’t the above-the-square acrobatics but the way he could seemingly absorb contact from any angle and lay the ball anywhere on the rim and watch it softly roll in time after time.
It was almost unfair.
Regrets aside, McGrady looks back fondly at his time with the Raptors, where he survived a tumultuous 16-66 rookie season that featured general manager and president Isiah Thomas – who had the foresight to draft him – leaving midway through the year, a coaching change and an ownership change as well.
His solution to his first real winter?
“I guess I’ll have to break out the fur!” he said once.
The Raptors played at was then SkyDome and trained at York University’s Glendon College, where practices would have to booked around pickup games and badminton hours.
“Those days man, practising up at that college? Oh God. Glendon College?” he said to me at all-star weekend, laughing. “Toronto was a franchise that was very new, I was 18 years old. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know where Toronto was.
“But once I got there, got settled I loved the city and I still go back to this day and I love the city. Back then I had some great times. I’m 18 years old in a city where the legal age was 19 but I was still out having a good time, enjoying the city. It was a great time.
“I actually stayed at the SkyDome and I remember opening my blinds, looking out the window and watching a [Blue Jays] game or an Argonauts game. Playing against MJ [Michael Jordan] when the building had 35, 40,000 people in there. I didn’t like playing in [SkyDome], but some great memories.”
He credits his time in Toronto for laying the foundation for his Hall of Fame career.
“It was part of the maturation process,” he said. “Butch Carter [who took over as head coach from Darrell Walker in McGrady’s rookie season] did a lot for me when I was there. Being around a bunch of veterans – Charles Oakley, Kevin Willis, Dee Brown, Dell Curry and those guys. Being able to learn from them.
“Being able to sit back and watch Vince become a star in this league and knowing how to handle that when I got my opportunity, it was great.”
And when he got his opportunity he was great. Hall of Fame great.
But regrets? There’s not a Raptors fan alive that doesn’t have a few.
McGrady too.
