In the spring of 2000, all things seemed possible for the Toronto Raptors.

If the hope was genuine and the hype was mostly justified, it’s because the nascent NBA team had been graced with the presence of two giant talents. Vince Carter, the league’s reigning slam-dunk champion, was at the time one of the most popular basketball players on the planet. On his best nights, he was also one of the most unguardable. And then there was Tracy McGrady, still mostly a backup player in those days but already the subject of whispers that he might one day turn out to be better than Carter, his distant cousin.

That day, it turned out, didn’t arrive with McGrady residing in Toronto. With his three-year rookie contract expiring at that the end of a 1999-2000 season that saw the Raptors make the first post-season appearance in their then five-season history, McGrady was an impending free agent with no end of suitors, the citizens of Toronto among them. Fans carried signs that urged: “Come Back T-Mac!” Shirtless young men painted the same message across their chests. The Raptors set up an email address with which fans could flood their six-foot-eight hero with pleadings he stay.

He didn’t stay, of course. McGrady, who grew up in tiny Auburndale, Fla., fled to nearby Orlando only months after his 21st birthday, and his return trips to the Air Canada Centre would be accompanied by the vicious boos of a jilted populace. But more than 13 years later, in the days since he announced his retirement from the NBA last month at age 34, McGrady has been looking back fondly on his time in the NBA’s Canadian outpost.

“In hindsight, looking back, obviously I wish I had stayed in Toronto,” McGrady was saying in a recent telephone interview from his home in the Houston area. “There’s no doubt we could have contended for a championship. I think about that often. But if ‘if’ was a fifth, you know?”

If “if” was a fifth, as the hip-hop lyric goes, Raptor fans would have been drunk on dunks for years to come. Alas, there were forces that conspired to drive McGrady south of the border. Not only did McGrady have an agent, Arn Tellem, with close ties to Chicago chairman Jerry Reinsdorf who set up a series of ultimately fruitless flirtations between McGrady and the Bulls. He also had people close to him with agendas of their own. McGrady acknowledged that members of his camp continually pushed him to sign in Chicago, the market from which Michael Jordan had helped build Nike into a global behemoth, in an effort to maximize McGrady’s endorsement potential.

“They were going to get a percentage off of (my endorsement income),” McGrady said of his advisors, among them Alvis Smith, a shoe-company talent procurer who was credited with “discovering” McGrady as a high schooler. “They were pushing me to go to Chicago and I didn’t want to go to Chicago.”

McGrady never did land in the Windy City. He chose Orlando, he insists for his own reasons.

“I’m a stubborn dude,” McGrady said. “When you know what somebody’s agenda is and they don’t come out and tell you — it’s a hidden agenda — then that’s when they kind of rubbed me the wrong way. It’s like, ‘I don’t want to hear your opinion. Don’t give me no advice.’”

RELATED:

McGrady thanks Toronto fans on Twitter

PHOTOS: McGrady’s NBA career

Vince Carter’s kids: No. 15’s Toronto legacy

For all the stresses associated with his first few years as a pro — he arrived in Toronto fresh from high school at age 18, the youngest player in the NBA at the time — McGrady said he learned much during his tenure with the Raptors. Never mind that McGrady was mostly a backup, or that his only trip to the playoffs with the franchise ended in a three-game sweep at the hands of the New York Knicks. There was something special building in Raptorland in that moment.

And sure enough the season after McGrady departed, the club reached what’s still its high-water mark, coming within a Vince Carter jump shot of the Eastern Conference final.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Seen more than a decade in retrospect, with the two-time-defending champion Miami Heat sitting atop an NBA dominated by superteams, Toronto fans can only lament the fact that McGrady emerged at a time when young NBA stars were often accused of being bent on landing their own teams.

“There’s no doubt we would have won that series if I would have been there,” McGrady said. “We had incredible camaraderie. You can’t duplicate that, man. Big brothers, little brothers — we had a mix. And me and Vince were in the perfect situation. You’ve got the two young superstars and you’ve got these old vets. They were our force field. They protected us from anything that happened on that basketball court. They did all the dirty work. And all we had to do was just concentrate on putting the ball in the hoop and guarding who we were guarding. It was just such a great time in my career.

“Had I been a little older and wiser and knew what was ahead of me, I would have stayed, no doubt, with those guys. But that was some of the best times of my life, man. Being with (Charles) Oakley and Kevin Willis and Antonio Davis, Muggsy (Bogues), Dell Curry, Dee Brown. Man. I still talk to a lot of those guys to this day. Because I appreciated how they looked out for me. They were all professionals.”

Once a skinny kid in a purple uniform, McGrady now can sound like a jaded curmudgeon lamenting the state of the next generation.

“You’ve got some guys in the league now who are just knuckleheads,” McGrady said. “What turns me off is guys doing the wrong thing. Just the legal part of it, hanging out, getting these DUIs, marijuana — all that crazy stuff, just doing the wrong thing, setting a bad example for the young guys ... I don’t quite understand it. I take a guy like (Michael) Beasley. Had all the potential in the world but he’s not level-headed. He just doesn’t get it. And a very talented player. But where else are you going to make this type of money doing something you love to do every day, take care of your family and play basketball. I mean, are you serious? You get millions of dollars for it and you mess these opportunities up? I don’t get it.”

McGrady has been cast as a villain in these parts. But his career, in which he never found himself in the headlines for bad behaviour, is worth respecting. Though he was never a healthy contributing member of a team that won a playoff series — injuries to star teammates Grant Hill and Yao Ming and to himself derailed his best chances at post-season success — he was a two-time scoring champion and a seven-time member of the all-NBA team. No less than Kobe Bryant recently named McGrady his toughest matchup, a plaudit that left McGrady “shocked.”

“That’s a huge (compliment) coming from somebody that never gives anybody any credit,” said McGrady, who admitted he was “surprised” by the amount of attention his retirement announcement received because his recent handful of injury-depleted seasons had given him the idea that he “wasn’t really relevant in the NBA anymore.”

McGrady said that, looking back, the mid-career back and knee woes that led to his athletic decline were a direct result of the heavy minutes he played upon his arrival in central Florida, where his anticipated running mate, Hill, never really recovered from an ankle injury that interrupted a stellar rise.

“There’s no doubt the first couple of years in Orlando, I didn’t expect to have those minutes piled up on me,” he said. “I paid for it later on in my career.”

McGrady may yet play pro ball again, possibly in Asia, where his personal brand is powerful enough that he said he derives income from the sale of everything from luggage to bottled water — this to supplement the more than $162 million (U.S.) he has earned in career NBA salary. The level of play in the Chinese league, where he spent time last year before riding the bench to the NBA Finals for the San Antonio Spurs, is such that he can operate as a star.

“Being able to go out and have the ball in my hands and do what I do on the basketball court — that was so refreshing,” McGrady said. “It was good to get that feeling of being celebrated again while I was playing over there.”

He was celebrated on this side of the planet, to be sure. Raptors coach Butch Carter once likened travelling with Vinsanity and T-Mac to touring with the Jackson 5. But Toronto and McGrady were never to be. Speaking of powerful forces conspiring to drive him out of Canada, McGrady listed as chief among them the stiff winter wind that blew along the Lake Ontario shore as relentlessly as he filled the rim at his best.

“Oh man. I lived right there on Queens Quay. I used to send my girl at the time — now she’s my wife — I used to send her down to the supermarket to go shopping. I’d look out my window and see her walking in the cold weather freezing her butt off. I was like, ‘This is not my type of weather here,’” McGrady said, laughing.

“At the time I’m trying to make a decision whether to stay in freezing Toronto or go home to Orlando. ... I just thought it was a no-brainer. As I said, if I’d been a little older and a little wiser maybe things would have been different. ... It’s definitely something I always sit back and reminisce about, thinking about Toronto and what we could have been.”

Read more about: