HoopsHype.com Columns

Playing hard, or hardly playing?
by Gregory Broome / January 17, 2005

In the 1999 film “Office Space,” frustrated office worker Peter Gibbons gave voice to a generation of uninspired cubicle-dwellers who saw little or no meaning in their daily efforts when he said, “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just that I don’t care.”

According to Tracy McGrady, one can be just as bored earning eight figures a year to play ball. Sometime last season, with the Orlando Magic exploring new frontiers of futility, McGrady simply lost interest. Maybe it was sometime in their humiliating 19-game losing streak. Maybe it came in loss number 40, or 50, of the 61 failures his team would ultimately post.

The point is, it happened, a fact McGrady is willing to acknowledge now, nestled safely in playoff contention with the Houston Rockets.

“I'm not going to sit here and say I played my hardest every night,” McGrady told Sports Illustrated. “Some nights I did slack off – and I knew that was a terrible thing to do – and I still was slacking off.”

This confession prompted outrage from the appropriate busybodies who are outraged by such things. But McGrady, albeit with his usual tactlessness, was simply expressing a truth NBA followers have known for some time.

Coaches, players, fans, and even alleged experts will all readily admit that the level of competition is elevated in the playoffs, with games marked by sharper cuts, more attentive defense, and more frequent scrums for loose balls. Regular season games possessing these attributes are said to have “playoff intensity.” Taking it further, Charles Barkley once defined the 82-game grind as the “preseason,” a mere warm-up for the playoff main event.

Does all this mean that players – even those we admire for their consistency – are not giving their full effort in most regular season games? In short, yes. To acknowledge that players ascend to a higher competitive level in the playoffs, we must also concede that they got there from a level below. And if that’s the case, they’re not playing as hard as they could be.

After dropping $60 for the local team’s February matchup with the New Orleans Hornets, Joe Ticketholder understandably does not want to hear that Player X’s performance will arrive in an envelope that evening.
But, says Detroit’s Rasheed Wallace, the monotonous nine-month schedule of an NBA playoff team requires
players to pace themselves.

“There’s going to be times when people say it looked like we weren’t going hard, because it happens,” explained Wallace when asked to respond to McGrady’s comments. “I don’t know (anyone) in this league who goes hard for 82 games, plus the playoffs. There's going to be a couple nights where you might just cruise through… You've got to get your body that rest. But, as far as everyone saying that taking nights off is bad or whatever – no, it's stuff that we need."

Wallace and his peers need that rest so they can fully apply themselves when stakes are highest – in the playoffs. Yes, we’d like to see our favorite player turn in the game of his career on the night we happen to show up at the arena, but the player knows his career and reputation are primarily defined by his performance in the most crucial of games – the ones where a loss ends a season.

This is the same motivation that leads a chef to present his best meal to the restaurant critic, or a job seeker to linger in front of the mirror a few minutes extra before an interview. The prospect of reward motivates like nothing else, while its absence leads, invariably, to a certain degree of complacency.

So the comments of McGrady and Wallace basically provide official confirmation of the obvious, like a meteorologist telling you it’s raining outside your window.

Players play harder in more relevant games. To borrow Orlando general manager John Weisbrod’s snarky response to McGrady’s admission: “This just in.”

This is not to say that every case of professional lethargy can be so easily justified. Vince Carter recently admitted that he often failed to exert himself as a member of the Toronto Raptors.

When asked by TNT’s John Thompson if he has always played hard, Carter’s response was, put simply, annoying. “In years past, no,” Carter replied. “I was fortunate to have the talent. You get spoiled when you’re able to do a lot of things. You see that you don’t have to work at it.”

What is most striking about Carter’s comments is the fact that Carter, unless you include a dunk contest, has never won anything in the NBA. He’s never even played for a conference title, much less the championship. So where McGrady was frustrated by his team’s irrelevance, and Wallace, who won a title last season, subscribes to the marathon-not-a-sprint school of competition, Carter was perfectly satisfied with the individual fame his athletic prowess brought him, and little concerned with the work of improving his team.

Carter’s word choice also implies a general apathy that should disturb his former and current fans. Where McGrady and Wallace discuss mere nights of waning effort, Carter speaks in years. It would seem that Carter’s entire approach to the game was – and possibly is, based on the evidence of his brief career in New Jersey – to ride his talent as far as possible, and stop there, like hopping on a skateboard and rolling to an eventual stop, never bothering to push off with your foot.

So take it easy on Wallace and McGrady – anyone with a job should forgive their lapses. As for Carter, he’s got more to prove than ever.

Gregory Broome is the editor of the NBA column at suite101.com

Tell us what you think about this column. E-mail us at HoopsHype@HoopsHype.com