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Everything in threes: Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady retire, Lamar Odom is probably not missing but very possibly struggling with drug addiction. Crack has been mentioned.

That’s two emblematic All-Stars of a gloriously damaged era, retiring. And Odom, one of its most beguiling what-ifs, warping his already fucked-up career arc in ways previously unimaginable. AI and T-Mac were big names. For some of us, Odom was nearly their equal.

Retirement for Iverson and T-Mac was a formality. If anything, it’s hastened the process that turns legacy from idle discussion to burnished consensus. Iverson was once the one-man embodiment of basketball’s culture wars. He’s now an icon whose place in history is indisputable, no matter how one feels about its effects. It’s also difficult to tell whether he laid the groundwork for present-day ballers or was the moment they found a way to move past. As a player, the high-scoring guard was neither as brilliant nor as mortifying as the two sides held him to be. Iverson was always somewhere in between.

McGrady is a far simpler case: Maligned for a lack of toughness and an inability to make it past the first round of the playoffs, T-Mac was an incandescent talent ground down by back problems. His Orlando years were sublime; although the dunk on Shawn Bradley and the 13 points in 35 seconds came in Houston, T-Mac’s game with the Magic was why, briefly, he was seen as a legit pre-LeBron threat to Kobe Bryant’s supremacy at the shooting guard position. That’s the Tracy McGrady most attractive to memory.

There’s obviously a world of difference between retirement and confounding public scandal. Yet the parallel is oddly appropriate, given their respective roles in basketball at the turn of the millennium. AI and T-Mac were major figures; they may have been divisive, but at least everybody knew what the fight was over. Odom, the insider’s choice, was an impenetrable code. He came out of Queens as one of NYC’s last great basketball hopes, a Frankenstein-like mélange of skill who could keep you from scoffing at the Magic Johnson comparisons. As part of a stacked young Clippers squad, Odom was often the best player on the floor, even if it took a trained eye to notice. To the casual viewer, he was little more than a wraith.

Part of what made Odom so intriguing was that he was never a disappointment, always a tease. He helped his team without ever emerging as the kind of star we felt he could be. Odom was enigmatic in LA; in one year with Miami, Odom was emboldened enough to come into focus; then came that fuzzy Lakers period, where he failed to mesh with Kobe as a pseudo-Pippen, and yet still managed to win two titles as a secret weapon called on to fill in all kinds of blanks at all kinds of times. More importantly, during this period he partnered up with Khloe Kardashian, which lead to a reality show, television commercials, and visibility for the former cult favorite that came as a bit of regularly scheduled cognitive dissonance.