NBA Free Agency: Tracy McGrady, Detroit Pistons Try To Reclaim Spotlight

When it was announced that Tracy McGrady would be joining the Detroit Pistons on a one-year contract for the veteran's minimum salary, it brought to a close a long and winding odyssey for the seven-time All Star. The two-time NBA scoring champion had been holding private workouts for teams around the league, most notably the Los Angeles Clippers and the Chicago Bulls.

It also confirmed what seems to be another trend of this most remarkable summer in NBA history.

No, not bona fide All Stars switching jerseys and shifting the balance of power in the NBA, though that in itself is enough of a storyline to carry basketball through until the season tips.

Rather, T-Mac's arrival in Detroit is yet another example of an NBA superstar, a stalwart of the first post-Jordan generation, struggling to find a willing suitor now that he is undoubtedly past his prime. 

This rather exclusive club includes, among others, Shaquille O'Neal, who just this week made official his stewardship of the elderly Boston Celtics; and Allen Iverson, who has become something of an anathema to NBA franchises over the past year or so.

Though great players changing uniforms late in their careers is nothing new (Gary Payton and Karl Malone in 2003, Michael Jordan at the end of his playing days, etc.), rarely have former league MVPs and first-team All-NBA performers struggled so mightily to find even the smallest niches to fill, both in terms of salary and playing style.

Shaq was fortunate to find one on a championship contender.

Considering the difficulties AI has faced in his search for a new home, perhaps T-Mac should consider himself among the lucky ones, even though his fortune is limited to a minimum contract on a team with its status as a perennial Eastern Conference powerhouse a distant sight in the proverbial rearview mirror.

And while the Big Shamrock's new digs may net him some more jewelry, McGrady's latest circumstances are, arguably, far more intriguing, as they smack of desperation as much as poetic justice.

As much for T-Mac as for the Detroit Pistons.

The irony of this move, which has received relatively little media attention when considering the parties involved, runs so deep that it could take the duration of McGrady's stay in Motown to unfold all of the layers.

To start, let's rewind the clock back 10 years, to August of 2000, when, as a budding young star, McGrady left the Toronto Raptors—a team he'd led to its first-ever playoff appearance alongside his cousin Vince Carter—for Orlando, in a sign-and-trade deal following a period of free agent courtship that saw the Chicago Bulls, among others, make unsuccessful bids for the native Floridian's services. 

With the Magic, McGrady was expected to play sidekick to Grant Hill, who had come over via free agency from (you guessed it!) the Detroit Pistons. The Magic anticipated that its new duo would lead the franchise back to the place of prominence it once held before Shaquille O'Neal bolted for Los Angeles.

As the story goes, things didn't turn out quite as Orlando had hoped.

The ankle injury that Hill sustained in his last playoff series with the Pistons never seemed to heal properly while he was with the Magic, as he played in a mere 47 games during his first four seasons in Florida, including a 2002-2003 campaign that he was forced to sit out entirely.

Meanwhile, following that very season, McGrady led his eighth-seeded Magic squad in a thrilling first round playoff series, which saw Orlando take a 3-1 series lead against (here we go again) Detroit, only to watch it slip away as the Pistons shut down T-Mac and claimed victory in seven games.

The next year, McGrady and the Pistons each enjoyed their finest years, respectively.  While T-Mac once again laid claim to the NBA scoring title, a statistical achievement bolstered by his career-best 62-point performance against the Washington Wizards, the Pistons won the 2004 league title by defeating their old Western Conference rival, the Lakers, in what was deemed a "five-game sweep" in the NBA Finals.

Following these noteworthy campaigns, each endured some turmoil as they approached the downward slope of the mountain of success that had been scaled.

T-Mac struggled to fit in with the Yao Ming-led Houston Rockets after being traded, along with Juwan Howard, in a deal that sent Steve Francis and Cuttino Mobley to Orlando. 

The Pistons finished the season with 54 victories and made it back to the Finals, where they lost to the San Antonio Spurs in seven games, though not before taking part in one of the ugliest moments in NBA history, an end-of-game brawl between players and fans often referred to as the "Malice at the Palace."

The years that followed saw T-Mac and the Pistons each attempting to reclaim their former glory with mixed results, though McGrady saw his fortunes take a turn for the worst far sooner than did Detroit's.

While Chauncey Billups and Co. extended their streak of consecutive Conference Finals appearances to six, by 2008 McGrady had earned a new nickname thanks to his recurring back problems and myriad other injuries that plagued him as a result–Half-Man, Half-A-Season.

It wasn't until the last two years that McGrady and Detroit synchronized their simultaneous swan-dive into insignificance.

As T-Mac's knees began to crumble, Pistons GM Joe Dumars, in his infinite wisdom (see Darko Milicic, 2003 NBA Draft), shipped Chauncey Billups, the engine behind the Motor City's six years of postseason success, to Denver in exchange for a–shell-of-his-former-self Allen Iverson in a move that Dumars claimed was done in the spirit of rebuilding.

This was shortly after his decision to replace the venerable Flip Saunders with the untested Michael Curry in one of the more puzzling coaching changes in recent memory.

Of course, it didn't take long for Dumars to try to rectify his own mistakes, choosing first to replace Curry, after one year, with former Cavaliers assistant John Kuester.

He then stumbled over himself to offer bloated deals to Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva—signings that precluded the Pistons from participating wholeheartedly in this summer's Free Agent Olympics and and left the franchise instead with two of the NBA's most notable contractual albatrosses.

That's not to say that T-Mac did any better for himself.

After electing to prematurely end his 2008-2009 season by having his knees operated on without notifying the Rockets, McGrady became embroiled in a much-publicized dispute with coach Rick Adelman and the Houston front office, which resulted in T-Mac landing with the Knicks in a three-team deal this past February. 

Though McGrady displayed flashes of his former self early on in New York, his efforts did not garner much national attention over the final two months of the regular season.

And so, after a month that saw the Pistons lay more-or-less dormant while T-Mac zigzagged the country in search of suitors, their paths have finally converged.

The circle of irony is closed at last.

The oft-injured, past-his-prime, former superstar has finally arrived in Detroit, with muted applause, to play for a team in the midst of a rebuilding period that has proved to be perhaps as painful as that which McGrady's body has undergone over the same span. 

A team that was certainly not McGrady's first choice—that, in fact, is the historic and geographic rival of the team he so desperately wanted to play for, the up-and-coming Chicago Bulls.

That's not to say that the two parties won't prosper together.

Who knows?

Maybe T-Mac will return with a vengeance, leading the Pistons back to the postseason now that his body is sound and his competitive fire has been stoked by his many doubters around the league.

While the likelihood of such a renaissance is difficult to predict, it's certainly a story of unusual, if currently unappreciated, intrigue, if not for its own sake—as the revival of an iconic franchise led by one of the most prolific scorers of the 2000s—then for the sake of the bigger picture of the 2010-2011 NBA season, of which it will be a part.

Strange to think, 10 years after T-Mac's first foray into free agency, that Shaq would be playing for the Celtics, Grant Hill would be healthy and playing in all of his team's games, Vince Carter would be part of a championship-caliber duo in Orlando, that Allen Iverson would effectively be shunned by the league over which he once towered.

That Tracy McGrady would be attempting to, at once, lift himself and the Detroit Pistons out of the quagmire of basketball irrelevance.

The NBA—Where WTF?! Happens.