Fran Session: Hard to know what to believe with T-Mac
By Fran Blinebury, for NBA.com
Posted Feb 18 2009 5:34PM

HOUSTON -- Tracy McGrady says the season is over for him. Then again,
McGrady says lots of things.

McGrady said he never wanted to leave Orlando. But then he said that he didn
't always try hard for the Magic, and he shut it down for the last 15 games
in the spring of 2004 because, while he was leading the league in scoring,
the team wasn't going anywhere.

McGrady said that he came to Houston to lead the Rockets to great things.
And then he promptly handed off the mantle of responsibility to Yao Ming.

McGrady said prior to the 2007 first-round playoff series against the Utah
Jazz, "It's all on me." Then after the Rockets lost, he said, "It was never
on me."

McGrady said he "was tired" in the second half of Game 6 of the 2008 playoff
elimination loss to the Jazz, noting defender Andrei Kirilenko got to come
off the bench fresh and he had to play the whole game.

The entire 2008-09 season has been more a frustrating verbal volleyball
match between McGrady and the club rather than the hoped-for championship
run that was anticipated when the Rockets traded for Ron Artest last summer.
McGrady had arthroscopic surgery to clean up his left knee on May 6 and
arrived four months later saying his recovery would be a process, but he
would get stronger. Then he didn't.

There were last-minute scratches from the lineup that did not sit well in
the locker room. There was even a short-lived plan for him to play only one
game of every back-to-back on the schedule.

McGrady slammed down a vintage dunk in the face of Tyrus Thomas earlier this
month and said he proved to himself that he was back, finishing with 16
points and six assists in a win over Chicago. Six nights later, McGrady went
up for a dunk and embarrassingly clanked the ball off the underside of the
rim, finishing with three points on 1-for-9 shooting in an ugly loss at
Milwaukee. He said there was no pain in his knee, just a mental block.

And then things got weird.

A week ago, McGrady said he was not even considering surgery. He and the
Rockets said his MRI showed no changes. He had not improved, but neither had
anything gotten worse. He had been playing. He was feeling better and
saying he'd turned the corner. Doctor after doctor said that McGrady could
play and would grow stronger if he did. McGrady said nothing had changed in
his condition. Now he needs microfracture surgery?

The Rockets weren't saying for sure, perhaps because the day after McGrady
made his announcement to ESPN and posted the decision to have surgery on his
own Web site, he still had not contacted the team.

"I found out the way everybody else did ... in the paper," coach Rick
Adelman said following Wednesday's practice. "There's a right way to do
things and this was not the right way to do it. I think there should be
protocol there."

None of that means McGrady does not require surgery, only that there are so
many inconsistencies in the information about his condition, as there have
been all season. But that has been the thread running through the storyline
of McGrady's 12-season NBA career -- a wildly divergent mix of extraordinary
talent with less than satisfying overall results.

For every video clip of T-Mac once scoring 13 points in the last 35 seconds
to take down the San Antonio Spurs, there is a side of the ledger that says
his teams are 0-7 in the first round of the playoffs, blowing a 3-1 lead to
Detroit when he was still with the Magic and blowing a pair of 2-0 leads to
Dallas and Utah with the Rockets.

He has a contract that pays $21 million this season and $23 million next
season. Yet the last remnants of the superstar label have slowly been
scratched off as the Rockets have reluctantly been forced to accept that T-
Mac is no longer the player they traded for and maybe never was who they
believed he could be --- a torchbearer who leads.

Now, as he approached his 30th birthday, in May, McGrady says he's opting
for the serious microfracture surgery, the kind that has been like an
unknown abyss for NBA players.

Can he make it all the way back like Amar'e Stoudemire, Kenyon Martin and
Jason Kidd? Does he return as a shadow of his former self like Chris Webber
and Penny Hardaway? Or does it take him right to the end like Terrell
Brandon and Jamal Mashburn?

Was it a coincidence that the pendulum quickly swung to surgery just when
McGrady's name was bubbling up in trade rumors, even though the team denied
interest in moving him?

McGrady says he's done for the season. Then again, he says lots of things.

It's what he does now that will say the most about T-Mac.

Fran Blinebury covers the NBA for the Houston Chronicle.