Dr Spaceman wrote:You've had some great posts on McGrady lately and I've decided I'm going to revisit and take a closer look. In my younger days I pretty much wrote him off as a ballhog with an attitude problem, but given how much I preach being unbiased and countering narratives that kind of makes me a hypocrite. You've inspired me to go back and watch some more McGrady, especially playoffs, and see if I can't get a handle on what you're seeing.
Incidentally, I've noticed we've had quite a few posters who have sort of become experts on certain players (not like "I'm a huge fan", but more like "I went back and took a closer look, and there's a bunch of stuff here that's way more impressive than we realized at the time".) You certainly fit this with McGrady and a couple others, SSB is amazing with his unbelievably thorough breakdowns of MJ and LeBron, I've seen some amazing posts by ardee on Wilt and ronnymac on Hakeem, etc. I've obviously become the Robinson guy, and if we do such a project I'm going to be pushing him very, very early. Not going to say where exactly, but let's just say it will turn a lot of heads.
Anyway, I'd love to get a project like this going, because the one thing I love more than anything else in the world is learning. It's less about the rankings than the discussion, and as someone who spends most of his time soaking up all the knowledge I can find, a project like this is really exciting.
I don't consider myself an expert on T-Mac's game, by any means, but thanks for the kind words, anyway.
In the "replace Kevin Durant with Tracy McGrady (01-05) from 11-15" thread, you said
"Only 2003 McGrady has a case against any version of KD from 2012-15, and Durant in 2014 peaked higher than 2003 McGrady anyway. Durant is a clearly superior player, and the Thunder would be quite a bit worse with McGrady in place of him."I agree with almost everything. "Almost", because I really don't think that 2014 Durant over 2003 McGrady is clear. I actually rank T-Mac ahead, by the slimmest of margins. Their boxscore numbers are extremely comparable (PER, WS/48, BPM, VORP almost equal), but McGrady seemed to have even higher impact, and he played a bit better against a top 5 defensive team in the playoffs. By "higher impact", I mean - T-Mac's on/off court net was +11.8, Durant's was +7.3 (according to 82games.com), and the Magic had 109.3 ORtg with McGrady on the court, 91.8 without him (+17.5), Thunder had 112.3 with Durant on the court, 103.3 without him ("only" +9.0 differential). That's a solid gap in T-Mac's favor. McGrady was a better playmaker (his AST/TOV% ratio was amazing, even better than prime MJ's), and even though his scoring efficiency was much lower (63.5 to 56.4% TS, with pretty much the same scoring average), less of shots were assisted on. The gap in terms of TS% is smaller when you adjust it to league average (league average TS% in 2003 was 51.9%, in 2014 it was 54.1%, so the gap shrinks from 7.1% to just 4.9% - I'd still take Durant as a pure scorer, but I'd lean towards McGrady as an overall offensive player, because of his superior ballhandling and playmaking).
It's extremely close, and if you think that KD was better, I have no problem with that. I just have a problem with the fact that you apparently don't see it as very close, in terms of peak.
I totally agree that Durant is easily superior if you compare their 5-year primes (01-05 T-Mac, 10-14 KD). McGrady's 2003 season was an outlier compared to the rest of his prime.
