McGrady: Harden, Howard need to let go of their egos
With his debut Thursday afternoon on “The Jump,” Tracy McGrady is now part of the coast-tocoast ESPN congregation. But if he were still part of the Rockets organization, McGrady said, he would have a heart-to-heart talk with Dwight Howard and James Harden about how to recapture the spark of last season’s playoff push.
The “big elephant in the room,” McGrady said, is the necessity to yield individual glory for the good of the team.
“They’ve got to let their egos go. Check your egos and buy into the team and buy into one another and compete,” he said. “Stop worrying about numbers and who has what. Compete and play basketball.”
McGrady still lives in Houston, and even though his new duties with ESPN will require him to spend more time in Los Angeles, he said he still keeps in touch with Rockets owner Leslie Alexander and team president Tad Brown.
He said “it’s not my place” to talk to Howard and Harden without an invitation to do so, but he’s open to an invitation.
An opportunity to seize
“You don’t go from the Western Conference finals to talking about breaking up the team and guys not getting along,” McGrady said. “You have to capitalize on this opportunity of two great players playing with each other with great talent around them.”
These are different times and different personalities, but McGrady said he knows about the necessity of making adjustments. He said that when he was traded to the Rockets in 2004 after winning scoring titles in Orlando, Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy made it clear he would have to adjust his game to playing alongside Yao Ming.
“It was a struggle,” McGrady said. “My (points per game) were down, and it took some time to adjust to playing with the big man. But when we worked it out, it was easy. I realized what I had to do to make Yao happy and to get him going.
“When you’re a scorer, you can always get your shot off. I’ve told James that in the fourth quarter, he’s going to have the ball 90 percent of the time, so the thing to do is to get Dwight going early and see how he’s doing.”
Although the challenge would seem to be similar, McGrady said the current Rockets are light-years ahead of the team with which he played.
Scary potential
“This team is way more talented. We were just lacking talent. These guys have the talent,” he said. “James Harden is one of the great scorers in the league. Dwight Howard is a defensive presence. His offense has gone down a little bit, but he’s still a valuable player.
“These guys have to work together, because they have other pieces around them. If they get in the playoffs, if they’re clicking, they can be a scary team.”
Meanwhile, since he’s moving into the analyst’s chair, McGrady is now in the grading business. Along those lines, he said he would give Rockets general manager Darryl Morey a C for this season, taking into account his decision to fire coach Kevin McHale early in the season and folding in an F for the Ty Lawson trade.
“If you’re James Harden, why do you want a point guard when you handle the ball 90 percent of the time?” McGrady said. “He’s not a catch-and-shoot guy. That trade didn’t work out. Darryl typically does a great job, but he got ahead of himself this year.
“Hopefully, having this long break after the All-Star Game, these guys can come together and turn things around.”
McHale recently noted that Harden arrived in training camp out of shape and Howard was unable to put together back-to-back practices early on because of injuries, which ruined the team’s early-season chemistry.
Morey said when he fired McHale that he still believed in the team as presently constituted, an observation that caused some to shake their heads at the time and continues to do so.
“Why should you believe in them? Have they given you anything to believe in?” McGrady said. “They have the pieces, the two guys who can turn it around, but it’s up to those guys. They have to look at themselves.”