Tracy McGrady Returns To Cheers, Surprisingly

The Houston Rockets and Tracy McGrady have essentially been playing a game of chicken for a month now. McGrady was practicing and continued to insist he was ready to play, while the Rockets did everything they could to hold him out.

You got the sense that the Rockets were legitimately concerned that McGrady would mess up their chemistry. They’re one of the league’s surprise teams this season, as they’re very much a part of the playoff picture in a loaded Western Conference despite not having McGrady or Yao Ming. Alternatively, as Jerome Solomon of the Houston Chronicle writes, the Rockets may have been hoping to hold McGrady out as long as possible so they could collect injury insurance money for each game he sat.

Either way, it looked like public opinion was swinging against McGrady, at least among Rocket fans. However, as Solomon writes, when McGrady checked into the game last night, the Rocket fans gave him a standing ovation, with very few boos mixed in.

Many times since his season came to an end last February because of a knee injury, the image of Tracy McGrady drew a strong reaction at Toyota Center.

Typically, the crowd booed when McGrady was featured during the team’s pregame highlight video.

Tuesday night, however, McGrady’s appearance elicited a much different response from the Rockets faithful.

After nine months out of uniform, a career-threatening surgery and a number change, McGrady returned to the Rockets’ lineup against the Detroit Pistons and drew a rousing ovation, with a sizable portion of the crowd rising to its feet to welcome him back.

To this outsider, that behavior seems kind of strange. Maybe there’s a simple “absence makes the heart grow fonder” phenomenon at play here. Or maybe, as SB Nation’s Rockets blog The Dream Shake writes, Rockets fans were never actually upset with McGrady in the first place.

I admit that I’m a T-Mac fan. Through all of the crap over the past year about Tracy McGrady, I’ve maintained a pretty consistent belief in his commitment to the team, to his career, and to basketball in general, so forgive me if I view his return through the rosiest of lenses. A little over a month ago, I wrote that the T-Mac injury “saga” felt, if nothing else, like it was coming to a close, and tonight was the beginning of the end, I hope. Even if this was simply a showcase for a trade, and even if McGrady doesn’t play significant minutes (or in a significant way) for some time, it just felt good to see the Tracy back on the court. And Rockets fans obviously felt the same way. Yeah, there were a few boos scattered in there, but Tracy got a warm reception from a crowd that – supposedly – had turned on him forever.

It’s certainly an interesting situation. Did the Rockets really try to paint McGrady as the bad guy in all of this? I guess it’s possible, though if so, it clearly isn’t working. The far less sinister (and arguably more logical) explanation, though, is that the Rockets wanted to make sure McGrady was fully healthy before he played so his trade value wouldn’t drop.

I guess the coming games will give us more of an idea of what the Rockets were trying to do in holding McGrady out a month longer than he would have liked.