Tracy McGrady, Dirk Nowitzki, Kobe Bryant and the things that last

On December 2, 2004 — just over 12 years ago — Dirk Nowitzki and Tracy McGrady had a duel for the ages. McGrady scored 48 points, grabbed nine boards, and dished nine assists in what was ultimately a losing effort. Nowitzki had 53 points and 16 rebounds to go along with two assists and four blocks. Nowitzki put the Dallas Mavericks ahead by one with 53 seconds left in regulation on two made free throws, and McGrady had a chance to tie it with 27 seconds left on free throws, but missed one. The difference between an enduring memory and one that isn’t is sometimes just that little: It was a great contest, in regulation. But in overtime, it turned into a straight-up duel.

Ultimately, Nowitzki put the Mavericks up 10 points in the first minute and a half of OT with two made-jumpers, three free throws, and a 3-pointer, and that pretty much did it. But McGrady did drag the Houston Rockets back within four with two 3-pointers of his own, both highly contested, difficult shots. Over the course of those five minutes, Nowitzki went 3-4, with a 3-pointer and an and-1 and McGrady went 2-3, with two 3s. The end result: A 113-106 Mavericks win was pretty darn close to the difference between their extraordinary outputs.

McGrady was 25 and Nowitzki was 26. Who could have guessed what happened next?

2004-05 would be McGrady’s fifth season as an All-Star, ever since he put up 26.8-7.5-4.6 as a 21-year-old, his third in the league, his first with Orlando, his first as a full-time starter. He was coming off two straight years as the NBA’s scoring champ, putting up a monster 32.1 PER with pretty good percentages in 2002-03, and 28 in 2003-04. And he was far from a one-trick pony, then or after.

McGrady had five or more assists every year from 2001 to 2009 with one exception — 4.8 in 2005. He grabbed between six and eight rebounds a game every year from 1999 to 2006. He could do it all and did do it all, and he seemed poised to do it for a long time yet. In fact, in 2004-05, McGrady put together a season scarily similar to the one the one-year-older Kobe Bryant put up in Los Angeles, his first without Shaquille O’Neal. In 40.7 minutes a game, Bryant put in 27.6 points, grabbed 5.9 boards, and dished 6.0 assists, shooting 43 percent from the floor. In 40.8 minutes (jesus, people played a lot of minutes in those days), McGrady scored 25.7, grabbed 6.2 boards, and dished 5.7 assists while shooting 43 percent from the floor.

Who could have predicted that 25.7 points per game, down from 26.8, in turn down from 30.2, was actually be the start of a freefall that saw McGrady averaging 21.6 in 2007-08 and 15.6 in 2008-09? Who could have known he would only make two more All-Star games? Or that he’d be out of the league, after three barely adequate years, before he turned 33?

Who could have predicted that Nowitzki, a year older, and maybe not quite as bright a star at that point, would win a championship with what is generally regarded as one of the best playoff runs of all-time six years later? Who would have thought Nowitzki, who started a little slower than both McGrady and Bryant, would average nearly 22 points a game, half a percentage point off of 50/40/90 pace,10 years later?

Nobody could have predicted or known, that’s who. That’s why those games are so special. When the best are at their best, and the future is this murky thing that steals and steals, and you’re lucky enough to be watching, you watch, and you remember.

The problem for stars who hang around the league forever is that it’s really hard to remember anybody at their best when you’re watching the same person do less. The image you have of them gets replaced and replaced as they devolve from titanic gods of basketball destruction to slower, more deliberate shadows. The problem for stars who don’t hang around the league is that they…don’t.

To watch Nowitzki in this game (which you can do right here) is to have an extraordinary series of oh-yeah moments. There’s a tendency, watching him now, to assume it was always thus: That he was never at all fast or athletic, but compensated with what he still has, the uncanny ability to freeze the game and work his way into his unblockable shot. But that’s just not true. In those days he was extremely mobile, with an extraordinary range of jab steps and hesitation moves to freeze defenders on the drive. Watch Karl-Anthony Towns sometime — it wasn’t quite like that, but it was like that. Heck, the most famous play of his career is a driving dunk.

Plus, the word with Nowitzki has always been that he was a poor rebounder, but that’s not true either. He was never a monster in that respect, but he averaged over nine rebounds a game for nine straight seasons. And when the team really needed it, he could board like nobody’s business. Check the 16 he had in this game, the 11.7 he averaged in the 2006 playoffs that ended in disaster, the 15.7 he averaged in three playoff games against Kevin Garnett in 2002, their only playoff meeting. As everyone who followed Nowitzki’s career closely knows, his mid-20s weren’t really the height of his powers. That did come after the game slowed down for him, after he stopped playing ball and started making art. But he was an absolute wrecking ball in those beautiful days, and so to watch is to remember.

When you watch McGrady in this game, instead, you’re just watching…McGrady. As a basketball player, in a sense, he never got older he just stopped existing. He looks like McGrady looked when he played basketball. Unstoppable. And let me tell you from someone who was there, there’s a lot numbers can’t and don’t show about him. For one thing, nobody’s ever shot like McGrady. His 3-pointers didn’t swish, they hit the back iron in just such a way as to drop in. It was basically pop-a-shot, but in the NBA, and the net never moved. And they dropped straight in. And he shot them from anywhere. He had Steph range before Steph. Plus, he inspired one of my favorite columns of all-time — this mad-cap comparison of McGrady to the hero of the Dune novels by Ralph Wiley.

Remember Page 2? Remember Ralph Wiley? RIP.

Looking at the shots they each hit in overtime says everything. The first one Nowitzki hit came off a bad pass, or maybe a good pass that he missed. Either way, he was standing at the elbow and it bounced off his hands. He ran to get it and in one motion got up and drained it. The next was something you never see any more, but you saw pretty often in those days: A 7-footer running the break, getting wrapped up and finding a way to muscle it in. The third was something you could see tomorrow, if Nowitzki were somehow to make it back on the court. The ball went around the arc, and found the big man. Nowitzki threw it up towards the ceiling and it came down through the net.

McGrady’s two 3-pointers, by contrast, both came out of double teams and out of nowhere. Other guys, like Garnett, maybe had worse teammates, but nobody ever had worse luck with teammates than McGrady. That Rockets team, with McGrady and Yao Ming, could have been epic if they’d ever both made it to the playoffs healthy. But they didn’t. And so there was McGrady, with it all on his back as usual. The first one came on an inbounds play, he came over and got it, with two green jerseys on him, and with no hesitation elevated and put it in from two feet behind the line with people all over him. In the second, he drove the lane and elevated but took about an hour and a half up there, decided he was covered, and tossed it to someone else, sidearm. He then ran over, behind the arc, behind the guard, received the ball again and hit another one with two hands in his face.

Everything about McGrady’s game was the ricochet — he bounced when he took it, it bounced when it went in.

And he would do that kind of thing all the time. What the kid who gets hot in an intramural game does is what McGrady did to NBA games when he got hot, just pouring it in. My enduring memory of the one Mavs-Rockets playoffs series, which both happened that year and turned out to be relatively unimportant, is just that, never feeling safe, never feeling like the lead would hold. McGrady’s known for a couple of heartbreaking Game 7s and this was one of them — he averaged 30.7-7.4-6.7 in the series, and even put up 27-7-7 in the clincher. But the Mavs won, 116-76.

With McGrady, it was about making something out of nothing. Everything was a good shot. When Reggie Miller was the most famous player to score a ridiculous amount of points in a short amount of time, it made sense because he was a good shooter and good at getting open. When McGrady took that title from him with a ridiculous 13 points in 35 seconds, however, it felt right, because it felt like he could always have done that. Nowitzki was just the opposite. With him, it was always the genius of shrinking the court and finding the right place to put up a shot that nobody could guard. Even if only he saw it, or knew how to get the shot off from there.

And in a way, that explains their careers, at least the part that McGrady’s own body doesn’t. A guy who can get the right shot every time survives. A guy who lives off making every shot the right shot can last only as long as his body is strong enough to impose its will on the game, as long as that body lasts. And you never know how long that is going to be.

Longevity is a gift, and a blessing, even if it is also a little bit of a curse. I was never a huge Bryant fan, and to be honest, part of that was my deep love for McGrady back when Bryant vs. McGrady was a thing. But, when everyone turned on him at the end of his career for stuff that had always been true — his inefficiency, his tendency to play hero ball both poorly and unnecessarily — they forgot what it was like when he was doing that at the height of his powers. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what old players get.

No, he was never as good at that last second shot as his reputation suggested and in fact he was statistically pretty bad at it. But nobody who was there should ever forget what he’d do the rest of the time. He got all his bad habits because he was better than anybody ever was at scoring in ridiculous ways. When he stopped being able to do that regularly, all people saw was how frequently he made ridiculous attempts when he didn’t have to. There was never any quit in Mamba, and his last game ever says all there is to say about him.

First of all, 60 points on 50 shots is ridiculous for so many reasons. For one thing, who could imagine any other retiring star even wanting that? Nowitzki or Tim Duncan? They’d find it embarrassing. But then, you start to make fun of him for it and you notice three things:

He actually shot 44 percent.
The Los Angeles Lakers were down by four with a minute left, and Bryant scored seven points to win it.
The Lakers were the last-place team in the West while the team they beat, the Utah Jazz, ended up one game out of the playoff picture.

In other words, Bryant beat a team that had everything to play for, with a team that had nothing to play for, by himself, just to say goodbye to the game in his own way. It was a parody that halfway through became a tribute. And it was beautiful.

McGrady’s career was ended by his body. So, in a sense, is everybody’s — even Bryant, whose 2013 Achilles injury threw his field goal percentage off a cliff and covered it in rocks. But he was in his late 30s at the time and before that, he got to spend 16 years being Kobe Bryant. Elton Brand, another guy who never recovered from a torn Achilles, had it happen in his eighth season. He limped on for another eight, but we’ll never know what could have been.

McGrady, of course, never even got that. Nor does it seem like he wanted it, once he couldn’t do what he was put on this Earth to do, the first thing he was put on this Earth to do. After various back treatments and microfracture surgery, he went to China, and seems to have had fun. He came back, made it to the Finals with the San Antonio Spurs. He devoted himself to the humanitarian cause in Darfur, made a documentary — he played baseball, minor, minor league baseball for the Sugar Land Skeeters. And it seemed like all he really wanted to do was record a strikeout, because he did, and then he retired. I’m not saying he didn’t want to keep playing basketball, but it’s clear he didn’t want to compromise and that he’s a guy with a lot of interests and a serious drive to experience things.

Still, it’s a shame how much of who we think of as all-time greats comes from the lists that are the sole property of the guys gifted with long careers, the all-time leaderboard, and it’s a shame how much real estate cumulative numbers have purchased in our collective imagination. I love the heck out of Jason Terry, but the fact that McGrady, one of the most gifted scorers who has ever lived, is looking up at him to the tune of 100 or so points tells you everything you need to know, everything about the difference between a transcendent guy who didn’t last and a good scorer who did.

But then you think about why you watch after all, and the fact that even history is writ in water. That was a game, that was a career, that was a player, and it was all wonderful to be a part of it when it was happening. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I never will again. He wasn’t like anybody. To me, at least, it doesn’t matter who he was better or worse than.

And that’s how it is, I guess. It’s all gone some day. If you’re not there for the memories you keep, you’re not really there for anything at all.

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Tracy McGrady and the things that last

By Andrew Tobolowsky | Dec 6, 2016