Tracy McGrady is not one to say a bad word about Kobe Bryant.
For the better part of the 2000s, the message board debates were raging about who was the best wing in the league. And McGrady had as good an argument as anybody to be considered better than Bryant.
About the only thing Bryant had on McGrady for a long time was his championship rings. That was a circumstance McGrady never came into.
But ask Tracy McGrady whether he would have won with Shaquille O'Neal as a teammate, and the answer is clear for one of the league's greatest individual scorers.
Unfortunately, McGrady never got that opportunity -- with the Orlando Magic playing alongside Grant Hill or with the Houston Rockets alongside Yao Ming. Those two represented the only meaningful Hall of Fame players McGrady played with during the prime of his career. Both were beset by injuries before McGrady dealt with his own series of leg and back issues.
As McGrady looks back at his career and particularly his time in Orlando, he looks at the Magic's inability to get him the team he needed to compete at the highest levels. In McGrady's eyes, he carried his Magic teams as far as he could.
It led to his greatness but prevented him from competing for titles.
"I am put in a situation where I have to do what I have to do to put these shots up. I have to force it," McGrady said on Carmelo Anthony's 7PM in Brooklyn podcast, a Wave original (eds. note: the podcast is NSFW). "But also be smart and take what the defense gives you. If it's too crowded and too loaded up, look for your teammates because obviously you are going to need them.
"That's how we made the playoffs, not having Grant Hill, because I used those guys. Pat Garrity knocking down shots. Darrell Armstrong knocking down shots. You aren't going to get far because your team is not going to advance like that. But you can win some games playing like that."
McGrady scored plenty in his four seasons in Orlando. He was an All-NBA First Team player and an MVP candidate. But he never had an All-Star teammate aside from Hill, who rarely played.
He leaned on high-level role players like Armstrong and one of the original stretch-4s in Garrity. They even got the 5-seed in the 2002 season.
But the team was never enough. And McGrady certainly openly acknowledges that he did not have enough to make a serious push in Orlando.
The failed Grant Hill partnership
The teammate issue was a big one in his time in Orlando.
The original idea was to try to go for the three big free agents in the summer of 2000 and sign Tim Duncan in addition to Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady. There are various stories on why the Magic were not able to get the trifecta, but Duncan stayed in San Antonio and the rest was history.
Hill was still a multi-time All-Star -- he would even be voted a starter for the 2001 game -- and a solid grab anyway. McGrady was the one with something to prove.
He did that, stepping up in Hill's absence to average 26.8 points per game, earn his first-ever All-Star nod, win Most Improved Player, finish sixth in MVP voting and be named to the second-team All-NBA in the 2001 season. The Orlando Magic earned a 7-seed and lost to the Milwaukee Bucks in four games.
Hill played only four games in that first season. And that became the pattern for nearly all of the seven years he signed in Orlando. Hill played only a total of 47 games in McGrady's four seasons in Orlando.
McGrady continued to blossom into a star, winning the NBA scoring title in 2003 and 2004, being named to the All-NBA first team in 2002 and 2003 and finishing fourth in MVP voting in those two seasons. But Orlando never got out of the first round.
It culminated with the Orlando Magic, as an 8-seed, losing a 3-1 lead in the 2003 Playoff series with the Detroit Pistons. That was followed by a 20-win season in 2004 that ultimately led to McGrady asking to be traded.
Tracy McGrady told Carmelo Anthony on the podcast that the 2004 season frustrated him especially because the Magic traded Mike Miller (a good friend of his on the team) at the trade deadline the season before and let Darrell Armstrong walk in free agency that summer. Orlando broke apart what little the team had to work with.
The bottom fell out on the group and McGrady felt he needed to move on rather than wait through ar ebuild.
McGrady was unafraid to score a ton of points, but he never had a teammate to ease the pressure off his scoring. And that eventually broke him.
McGrady's teammates made his legacy
When it comes to Tracy McGrady, that is the unfortunate story of his career. He never could get the team around him to compete at a higher level. His teams never met his talent before his body started to break down.
McGrady never got out of the first round until he was an add-on to the San Antonio Spurs at the end of his career in 2013. He played only 31 minutes in those playoffs.
Tracy McGrady will not say a bad word about Kobe Bryant -- McGrady called Bryant a mentor and someone he could call on for advice throughout his career. The two always had a huge amount of respect for each other -- Bryant called McGrady his toughest player to defend. They were certainly peers and contemporaries.
Bryant may have had a more intense attitude that lends itself to winning. But they both had similar skill sets and similar scoring profiles. Bryant just had the organization and teammates that could deliver him deep in the playoffs. McGrady, try as he might, could not.
McGrady is thankful for his time and is still mostly beloved in Orlando. His No. 1 jersey is a solid candidate to one day hang in the rafters along with his childhood hero, Anfernee Hardaway.
McGrady will always be one of the greatest players in Magic history. But his career will always come with a load of what-ifs. The biggest is what if McGrady had the kind of teammates that teams need to give their stars to advance in the Playoffs.