Legendary shooting guard Tracy McGrady is remembered as being one of the most lethal scoring forces in league history during his prime years, scorching opponents from game to game on the inside and out.
But what some basketball fans choose to remember, particularly when discussing the all-time great shooting guards, is which players have won an NBA championship. Fans will use that argument to debate against McGrady being an all-time great, as they do with players such as Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and John Stockton.
McGrady has a response to those fans:
“Social media can give a lot of people voices these days, and the first thing they say is ‘No rings, no rings,'” McGrady said Friday in an appearance at the Hall of Fame’s 60 Days of Summer Program, according to MassLive. “You have to have a great team and some luck to get a ring, right? Unfortunately, I wasn’t blessed with that. But I go back at them with this: Anybody can win a championship. Everybody can’t get in the Hall of Fame.”
While McGrady is wrong when it comes to his ‘anyone can win a title’ proclamation, it does take a special kind of player to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
McGrady, along with Bill Self, Rebecca Lobo and others, will be officially inducted on September 8.
“It’s such a surreal feeling,” McGrady said. “Before coming to the NBA, I didn’t know anything about the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t like a goal of mine. I just loved to play the game of basketball, and whatever accomplishments I got after that, obviously I’d be thrilled. This right here, this is awesome. The Hall? Really? From my story, where I came from, if I’d known that I’d be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, it really doesn’t get better than that.”
Despite failing to win a championship during his 15-year career, McGrady is undoubtedly one of the all-time great shooting guards in basketball history.
Playing for Toronto, Orlando, Houston, New York, Detroit and Atlanta, McGrady scored 18,381 points on 44 percent shooting in the NBA.
