The Whiteboard: Tracy McGrady’s 2002-03 season, an evolutionary leap

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Through his age-27 season, usually the generic marker for an NBA player’s athletic prime, Tracy McGrady played in 683 of 788 possible regular-season games (87 percent). And even that is perhaps a slight undercount as a measure of health and availability since he only played in 64 games as an 18-year-old rookie for the Raptors, with inexperience as much of a factor as health. After that age-27 season, he played in just 255 of 396 possible games (65 percent) and was out of the league at 33.

McGrady is already in the Hall-of-Fame, thanks to seven All-Star appearances and a pair of scoring titles, but that relatively brief and largely anonymous post-prime tail to his career has certainly depressed his legacy. We’re moving further and further away from his personal peak — the 2002-03 season — but every time I look at the numbers, I’m amazed. I know what I’m going to see, and I’m still surprised every time.

What made Tracy McGrady’s 2002-03 season so incredible?

In 2002-03, his third with the Orlando Magic, McGrady averaged 32.1 points, 6.5 rebounds. 5.5 assists and 1.7 steals per game, shooting 45.7 percent from the field and 38.6 percent on 3-pointers. The second- and third-leading scorers on that Magic team were a 22-year-old Mike Miller and a 30-year-old Grant Hill (who appeared in just 29 games). Second and third in Win Shares were Pat Garrity and a 34-year-old Darrell Armstrong. With a woeful supporting cast and all the extra defensive attention that implies, McGrady didn’t just lead the league in scoring. He led the league in unassisted 3-pointers and finished second to Kobe (who had the benefit of playing off Shaq) in unassisted 2-pointers, and finished 21st in points created by assist.

That season, McGrady was first in the league in Offensive Box Plus-Minus and the difference between his mark and Shaq’s second-place mark was the same as the gap between Shaq and Jason Terry at 28th. He was also, to that point, just the second player in the 3-point era to post a season with a Usage Rate and Assist Rate above 30 percent — the other was Michael Jordan. And despite carrying all that offensive weight, he was still a net-positive on defense, ranking 55th in Defensive Box Plus-Minus.

I think about this season a lot because I think it was a historical breakthrough, an evolutionary leap forward that brought us closer to the present era of dominant primary creators, the era of LeBron and James Harden and Luka Doncic. McGrady’s 2002-03 season took the dominant wing scoring of Michael Jordan and layered on pull-up 3-point shooting at and assists at a high-volume.

McGrady averaged 7.8 3-point attempts per 100 possessions that season, a mark that no player with a usage rate above 30 had ever hit before. He also made 86 unassisted 3-pointers that season, more than one per game. We only have reliable play-by-play data for the two seasons prior but it seems reasonable to assume that no one had ever hit that many before. Baron Davis made 88 the next season and Chauncey Billups hit more in 2005-06. But it wasn’t until 2007-08 that two players passed McGrady’s mark in the same season (Steve Nash and Baron Davis). And, as a reference point for how McGrady was a leading edge of this revolution, seven players made at least 86 unassisted 3-pointers even in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season. James Harden led the league with 248.

McGrady’s season wasn’t just noteworthy because of the dominance reflected in his aesthetics or statistics, or because it was an outlier high-point in a fascinating career of peaks and valleys. It was a window into the future, a campaign tinged by everything that was still to come.

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