The Irony of What McGrady Must Now Become

Don’t for a second mistake me for a Tracy McGrady hater. I have had boundless sympathy for the man, defended him against all charges, and will say, with a perfectly straight face, that in his healthy prime he was one of the most exciting scorers ever to play this game.↵
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↵But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, in fact, we’ve seen the last of Tracy McGrady. At least for a while. T-Mac will miss the remainder of the season due to microfracture surgery. As we all know by now, in the most healthy of patients, it takes at least a year to get back on the court, and then another to return to something resembling full strength. If you’re capable of believing that McGrady will have no other body problems to either slow the process or otherwise hamper his recovery, that means he’d be ready to play again in the spring of 2010, returning to whatever “normal” is for the perpetually injured T-Mac sometime in early 2011.↵
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The funny thing is, the Rockets’ de facto leader will be a free agent in the summer of 2010, when I anticipate small market teams cutting costs and large market teams having their pick of that free agent class. McGrady’s not going to command star figures, and there’s a chance that even a team looking to lowball the former All-Star might end up with a player who rarely takes the floor. If he wants another contract, T-Mac will have to rehab fully, and then impress teams in the summer of 2011 (no one wants to sign a walking injury risk for the playoffs, especially one suddenly forced to come off the bench for the first time since his Raptors days). Which means, best-case scenario, McGrady has a deal when the 2011-2012 season starts, at which time he’ll be 33.↵
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↵Where’s the silver lining? Remember how Grant Hill and McGrady were supposed to make Orlando great, but then Hill effectively dropped off the face of the earth? And how he’s resurfaced now as an old, but productive, member of the Suns? Irony of all ironies, that’s the kind of comeback McGrady should be going for. We have definitely seen the last of that transcendent scoring machine, but maybe some team will want him for his shooting, court sense, and passing.↵