Danny Granger's NBA Career Coming to a Swift and Painful Close

John Elway won a Super Bowl in the final start of his NFL career. So did Jerome Bettis. Bill Russell, at age 35, grabbed 21 rebounds in the last professional game he’d every play—Game 7 of the 1969 NBA Finals—to win his 11th title as a Boston Celtic.

This isn’t the way it usually goes, of course. Late-career triumphs are the exception, rather than the rule, for professional athletes. The modal conclusion to most stints in, for instance, the NBA, isn’t a paroxysm of glorious conquest followed by a parade and a lavish retirement ceremony. Quite the contrary. Most careers fizzle out. They end the way old cars breakdown: Small mechanical problems grow into large ones and eventually the vehicle just isn’t road-worthy any longer. Scrapped and moved on from.

Danny Granger is in the long, sad process of ceasing to be road-worthy.

Due to a grim combination of injury, illness and ineffectiveness, the 31-year-old forward has played only 135 minutes for the Miami Heat in 2014-15. This comes on the heels of two seasons in which the former All-Star played in only 46 games.

Granger just hasn’t been available much the last few years. Since the start of the 2012-13 season, Granger’s teams have played 192 regular-season games. He’s played in just 54 of them. And when he has suited up, he’s been consistently ineffective.

The last three seasons, Granger has produced minus-0.075, .073 and minus-0.021 win shares per 48 minutes, per Basketball-Reference.com. Up to that point, his worst individual season was 2006-07, when he produced a ws48 of .111, 11 percent better than league average. That’s a considerable dip.

The chief source of his woes is…almost everything. Across his career, Granger averages 27.4 points per 100 possessions. This season, that’s down to 13.9. His true shooting percentage in 2014-15 is down to 41.8 from a career average of 56. Per 100 possessions, in 2013-14, his personal fouls have nearly doubled from his career average (4.5 to 8.7), his trips to the line have shrunk (7.2 to 4.4) and his rebound (8.0 to 5.6) and assist (3.1 to 0.4) averages have dried up as well.

The Heat maintain, publicly, that they're confident in the forward. That they're simply taking it slow with Granger, getting his body 100 percent before they worry about insinuating him into the scheme. Erik Spoelstra said as much to the Sun Sentinel's Ira Winderman earlier this month:

"We've been working on his body...making sure that he feels better than he has the last couple of years. To do that and try to get him ready for games was little bit contradictory early on."

The Heat are trying to put a happy face on it, but the facts are plain: Any way you slice it, Granger is a shadow of his old, productive self.

And productive he was.

It feels like a distant memory at this point, but in 2008-09, Granger, then in his age-25 season, averaged 25.8 points to go along with 5.1 rebounds. The 6’9” small forward also shot 40 percent from three-point range. He followed that up with a campaign in which he dropped 24.1 points and 5.5 rebounds a night.

In the former season, Granger won Most Improved Player, made an All-Star team and finished fifth in the Association in points and fourth in total three-pointers made.

This wasn’t a blip, either. Granger put together a run of very good basketball at the close of the last decade and the beginning of this one.

In the five seasons between 2007-08 and 2010-11, Granger never averaged fewer than 18.7 points or five rebounds, nor did he shoot worse than 84.8 percent from the foul line or 36.1 percent from three. In his least effective season in that stretch, he posted a ws48 figure that was 20 percent above league average. Simply put, he was pretty good for a pretty long time.

The tragedy of Granger’s legacy, though—insofar as we can find anything tragic in the career of a happy, reasonably healthy young man who’s made over $66 million playing basketball before his 32nd birthday—is the timing of his peak. His decline years coincided with the rise of the Indiana Pacers, and so he never got the credit that comes from being a top scorer on a competitive team. That might have changed everything.

Granger belongs in that peculiar tier of players who were very good, sometimes for reasonably long stretches of time, but didn’t quite do enough to be remembered.