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By Dan Devine

I walked into the 2011 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference thinking I needed to be quick on
the draw with a graphing calculator and had to know my way around a scatter plot to keep up
with the next-lev chatter whizzing past my ample Irish melon. At Friday's first session, though, I
quickly found out that I mostly just needed to be willing to ponder Tracy McGrady's(notes) place
in basketball's space-time continuum. Done and done!

Well, that, and two other things. I needed to be willing to consider that being AMAZING at
something ² like, tallest letters on the marquee, top five in the world, stunningly and nigh-on-
unfathomably gifted ² could be not only bad, but also a massive impediment to becoming the
best version of yourself.

Huh and huh?

Best-selling author and noted hairsman Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept while
moderating the opening session of this year's Sloan conference. The talk dealt with how the
"10,000 hour rule" that Gladwell discussed in his 2008 book "Outliers" ² that the key to success
in any field is the purposeful practice of a specific task for 10,000 hours ² relates to an athlete's
development.

In considering that notion, Gladwell asked the panelists what value should be placed on pure
natural talent ² the innate genetic gift that we often view as the line of demarcation between the
elite and the merely professional ² in relationship to, say, work ethic and the capacity to accept
instruction.

As often occurs when discussing abstract ideas, talk turned quickly to a physical example ² in
this case, McGrady, whose combination of size, speed, power and grace beguiled the NBA in the
last years of the 20th century and made him one of the league's most dominant offensive forces
in the early years of the 21st.

But while McGrady's abilities were awe-inspiring, his willingness to further cultivate them
wasn't, according to panelist and ESPN NBA analyst Jeff Van Gundy, who coached the Florida-
born star with the Houston Rockets from 2004 through 2007.

Van Gundy estimated McGrady at "probably 1,000 hours of practice," just one-tenth of
Gladwell's rule, a figure that elicited laughter from the crowd. Noting that McGrady was as close
to he's ever seen as a basketball natural, Van Gundy went on to say that T-Mac "should be a Hall
of Fame player."

"His talent was otherworldly," Van Gundy said.

Van Gundy's tone was echoed by

his fellow panelist and former
employer, Houston Rockets
general manager Daryl Morey,
who inherited McGrady when he
took the Rockets' reins in 2007.

After praising McGrady's talents,

Morey said, "I do think [that
ability] got in the way of Tracy's
development."

"Much of the game was so easy

² you see this in the AAU level,
where they have freakishly
talented players," he continued.
"When it's that easy to dominate
at that young age because of
your physical tools ² his
wingspan was freakish, his size
was enormous, his IQ ² my
sense was, all that did get in the
way of Tracy reaching his
highest heights."

The basic principle makes some

sense. If you're bigger, stronger,
faster and more talented than the competition you're playing against, you're not forced to develop
the finer points of your game, because when push comes to shove, you can just rely on your
superior gifts to give you the edge you need. And when those gifts start to fade, if you haven't
been developing new skills (or sharpening old ones) for a rainy day, you'll find yourself soaking
wet in a storm that might just wash you away from the league.

A fastball pitcher coming back from major arm surgery should be working to make sure he's got
secondary pitches and doesn't have to rely on the old No. 1 all day. I get that part.

And the sentiments that McGrady has, to some degree, squandered his gifts and failed to make
the most of his talent aren't new ² they've been covered in the press for at least the last decade,
and they play a key role in the narrative of the chapter on McGrady in the first FreeDarko book.
While it was pretty surprising that two of McGrady's former bosses would so willingly throw dirt
on him in a public forum, apropos of nearly nothing, it's not alarming information or breaking
news.

Listen, Jeff Van Gundy's forgotten more about the game than I'll ever know. If he tells me that
McGrady could have ramped up his practice habits to a level that would've increased his body's
ability to stay healthy and execute the directives delivered by his sharp-as-a-tack on-court mind,
I'm not going to sit here and call him a liar.

Still, I can't help feeling like selecting McGrady as the poster boy for wasted chances is at least
partially a function of our own propensity as writers, observers, executives and fans to jam
talented players into a hyperbolic chamber, imbue them with whatever dreams may come and
then get all pissy when they don't pop out, pure and perfect, exactly the way our imaginations
envisioned.

Maybe more diligence would have enabled McGrady to avoid the lower back, left knee and left
shoulder injuries that have cost him wide swaths of playing time over the past nine years, first
with the Magic, then with the Rockets and, in a playing-out-the-string sequence, the New York
Knicks and Detroit Pistons. Maybe adhering to a better class of regimen would have mitigated
the fallout of the injuries, or would have gotten a healthier version of T-Mac back on the court
sooner. These are reasonable possibilities.

But all that said, it would be ludicrous to act like McGrady hasn't turned in what one can argue is
still a Hall of Fame-caliber career, even —
 the allegedly abysmal habits and all the time he's
spent on the shelf, especially considering that this is a Hall of Fame that includes the likes of
myriad college and foreign players that never attained  the level of individual notoriety
that T-Mac has.

McGrady has led the league in scoring twice and finished in the top 10 six times. He's made
seven All-NBA teams (two first-team, three second-team, two third-team) and produced a 2002-
03 season for the Orlando Magic that Zach Lowe of SI.com's The Point Forward blog calls
"perhaps the most under-appreciated great season in NBA history." And according to the Hall of
Fame Probability Rankings on Basketball-Reference.com, McGrady has the 13th-best shot for
enshrinement of any active ballplayer, right between Chris Paul(notes) and Amar'e
Stoudemire(notes). (The top 10 are virtual locks for Springfield. Vince Carter's(notes) 11, and
he'll be the subject of some debate when his time comes, I'm sure.)

The most famous knock against McGrady is that he's never made it out of the first round of the
playoffs ² he reached the second round in 2009 with the Rockets, but wasn't playing ² but that
critique is somewhat softened when you remember that the teams he was supposed to take to
greener pastures often featured sidelined or compromised primary running buddies like Grant
Hill(notes) and Yao Ming(notes). Tracy McGrady was one of the baddest man on the planet from
2000 through 2006, but because he frequently had to go to war as a one-man gang against
opposition that had better arsenals, he lost. Are his practice habits to blame for that, too? Do we
offer context for the losses, or merely count them as a black mark on his permanent record, as
well?

Part of what makes this difficult to digest is the word "freakish," which both Van Gundy and
Morey used to describe McGrady's talents ² in fact, that particular adjective was tossed around
pretty liberally during the session. I know it's become popular parlance, but its use is sort of
uncomfortable ² right off the bat, it casts McGrady's athleticism as rare, monstrous and
possessed of a stylistic resonance that's oppositional to the establishment. T-Mac's game always
seemed too lazy for the squares anyway, even when he was just getting ready to slice to the rim
and detonate.

"Freakish" sets McGrady's talent apart, but not necessarily in a positive way; it makes him an
undefined "other," a dude capable of feats beyond our ken. In most walks of life, we tend to
regard such others skeptically, looking for what makes them somehow wrong and us somehow
right. We look past the 18,000-plus points McGrady has scored and see only the 10,000 more we
feel pretty confidenthe should have pocketed if only he wasn't screwing around, because what
Ê
superheroes do, right?

Later in the session, when discussing the acquisition of new players via the draft or free agency,
Gladwell asked whether sports teams tend to overvalue potential while undervaluing what skills
players actually have. In McGrady's case, it feels like Van Gundy, Morey and their likeminded
folk are overvaluing what they perceived his absolute ultimate ceiling to be, agreeing that he
didn't reach it, and waxing wistful about what could have been, all the whole undervaluing how
lethal a force McGrady was when he was right and had it all cookin