Four-win center, start the new season earlier than everyone

NBA teams are ready to prepare for the upcoming new season. Dear young talents finally put on their first NBA jersey. As usual, some people leave when they arrive, and some are ordinary supporting actors who are unknown, and familiar names that have passed their peak and are no longer favored.

Some of them, perhaps still waiting for the call from the NBA, may re-play the firefighting role one day in the future. Others made a different choice: leave the NBA, go to other leagues, and continue to shine.

was born in January 1988 and is now 37 years old. He has made his second season away from the NBA. He chose the Ilivara Hawks in the Australian NBL League. In the first game, he made 15 of 20 shots, scoring 32 points, 13 rebounds and 3 blocks.

Although he failed to win the game, McGee's dominance at the basket was unobstructed. He used all-time relay to win the first point in the NBL, and then he started offensive kaleidoscope mode, turning all the opportunities at the basket into violent dunks. His debut 32 points are self-evident - he has played in the NBA for 16 years in total, with a total score of 983 games, and the highest score is only 33 points.

The head coach of the Hawks, Jason Tatum's father Justin Tatum, praised McGee. After the game, Old Tatum emphasized not McGee's gorgeous data, but his professional spirit.

"Javille played very well. He played in the NBA for sixteen or seventeen years. He understood the rhythm of the game, knew how to adjust his body rhythm, and knew where he was."

"More importantly, he worked as hard as everyone. Under Javier's leadership, we dominated the inside. I believe that in the short time afterwards, we can find a way to unite and expand his strengths further."

But McGee himself was not surprised. When he decided to come to Australia, he thought about what kind of person he wanted to be.

"In the NBA, I was never the protagonist. The team arranged for me to play role players and play at certain times, but when my career came to this stage, I wanted to be the protagonist, and I could decide where I went and how to play."

In fact, he has been away from the NBA for a whole year. If we count further, he has gradually been forgotten in the past three years: in 2022, he signed a three-year contract with the Mavericks, and from the start of the season, he became a marginal substitute, and was directly laid off after the season ended; the Kings signed a one-year contract with him, and then he served as a substitute here, with a per-game playing time in the past two years being 8.4 minutes and 7.4 minutes respectively. After the end of the season, no team sent him a contract. Until January 2025, he and Gallinari received an invitation from Arroyo to join the Bayanmon Cowboys in the Puerto Rico League. They successfully reached the end and won the championship trophy together. This season, his average of 17.1 points and 9.2 rebounds per game.

Mckey and Garlinari's choice after winning the Puerto Rico championship in Puerto Rico was somewhat unexpected - the Puerto Rico League's intensity is not very strong, and it is closer to the style of American basketball. Or it can be said that Puerto Rico is very close to the United States, and the league is more like another version of the Development League, and can be summoned to join the NBA at any time. The Australian style may be more like FIBA ​​basketball, which is full of more physical confrontations, fewer game rounds, and larger movements. Surviving here is much more difficult than before.

But McGee himself said that was exactly the reason he decided to come here.

"I played in the NBA for 16 years and have always been jealous of European players because they can go to different countries and really explore basketball there," McGee said. "I never had such a chance before, so when I had a chance to play in Australia, I grabbed it without hesitation." He certainly was not on the tour, and the Hawks chose him, and it was really missing this number: their original starting center Sam Florin was absent due to an Achilles tendon injury, so he looked for a reliable center all over the world.

Mckey said he knew exactly what to do.

"I will only bring championship-level basketball. They were champions before (the Hawks were NBL champions last season), and I won the championship the year before (Mckey also won the championship in Puerto Rico), so it's very simple, we play the championship in the way, it's enough. The audience likes to be more exciting, so I will give you a lot of dunks and blocks."

When McGee decided to come to Australia, fans on the Internet immediately expressed different opinions:

There are supportive ones:

"The players who just left the NBA will come to Australia, which will improve our level, we are very Welcome them. ”

There are some unsupportive:

"He can only cover a few hats, it's useless."

sensible:

"Shack created too much hatred, he ruined McGee's career, McGee is actually very good, not as bad as described."

There are also hustle...

"He has 3 championship rings and 1 Olympic gold medal, Yao Ming has nothing! I want to see McGee enter the Hall of Fame!"

But for McGee, what he is doing now is just to prove one thing:

He can still play basketball,

He also likes basketball.

However, McGee may have told a lie--he was not necessarily the European players who were jealous of whom he chose to come all over the world, perhaps just to pay tribute to his mother, Pamela McGee.

Pamela has a nearly perfect career. She has been a local sports star since high school and has excellent academic performance. She not only plays basketball, but also a Michigan track and field and shot put champion. After joining USC, she won the NCAA championship twice with the team in 1983 and 1984, and then in the summer of 1984, she represented the U.S. women's basketball team and won the gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics.

While in college, she played outstanding basketball and did not lose any academic performance. Pamela received two degrees in Economics and Communication from the University of Southern California. In the summer of 1984, she joined the Dallas Diamonds of the WBA, intending to play basketball for a few years before finding a normal job with her degree. But no one expected that WBA was disbanded after only one year of operation. Shortly afterwards, she fell in love with George Montgomery, a basketball player who was selected by the NBA, but when her son McGee was born, the child's father left.

"I had no other way at that time. I had to support me and my child," Pamela recalled that less than half a year after the child was born, she brought him to Italy on the other side of the world to play basketball to support her. "At that time, there was no baby food in Italy, and I had to get up and make baby meals for him every day."

"I really don't know how I did it," she recalled. "I just knew that this was what I should do, it was my task. I had to take good care of the child. I was his mother. I wanted to make every effort to make sure that his life was better than mine."

The father of the child never paid a penny of support, and at that time, perhaps now, the income of the women's basketball team was very meager. Pamela said that the biggest challenge in her life journey is financial pressure. All she can do is to keep traveling overseas, find various leagues and teams to compete, and earn money to support her children.

Pamela has played overseas for more than a dozen years, traveling between Brazil, Spain and Italy. She was selected as the All-Star in Italy four times and won championships in all three countries.

In 1997, the WNBA was born in the United States. Pamela McGee, 35, was selected by the Sacramento Monarch at the second pick in the first WNBA draft. A year later, she retired from the Los Angeles Sparks. In 2012, Pamela McGee was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame.

It was not until the age of 9 that young Javier McGee returned to the United States with his mother. He grew up parades around the world and grew up under his mother's careful care. Perhaps because both of their parents were from the inside, McGee inherited their outstanding figure and excellent athletic ability, and has also made his mark in the local area since childhood.

But at the same time, McGee also has some congenital diseases: he suffers from asthma, often with insufficient oxygen intake, and is more likely to get pneumonia than ordinary people; and insufficient oxygen intake also leads to childhood ADHD, which is the result that sometimes his hands and feet are not coordinated - this is not a problem with his motor nerves or motor IQ, but an unconscious disease.

It is also for this reason that the appearance of "Five Embarrassing" has continuously deepened the outside world's stereotypes about him. The name "my boy" seems to be close, but O'Neal actually never took the initiative to understand McGee's situation. He just brutally and arrogantly amplified the details of McGee's game and mocked him.

In fact, McGee's anger was never just because of himself. He said that every time he saw his mother angry and sad, he felt that he had become an adult, but he still had to make his mother feel scared and blame himself for the illness he had when he was a child. This made him feel very upset. He felt that when he grew up, what he had to do was to give his mother the best life, protect her and not let her be hurt.

Mckey may be able to catch up with the Slam Dunk Championship, but in 2012, when the United States was short of inside, he won a four-year, 44 million contract from the Nuggets before he could secure the start. The success was right in front of him, but the injury suddenly came to him. The two consecutive stress fractures of the left tibia caused his contract to only play 107 games together. In 2015, 76ers bought out his contract in advance. My boy seemed to be unable to fulfill his talent after all. With a contract of 44 million, his career was about to end.

In 2015, McGee signed a contract with the Mavericks, which was even an unguaranteed basic salary of 1+1. A year later, the Mavericks directly cut him off and were reluctant to continue to pay him a salary of over 1 million. The story that follows is more familiar to us: McGee signed a 1+1 base salary with the Warriors and shined in the playoffs. He became the Warriors' surprise in the playoffs, winning the championship with the team twice in 2017 and 2018. After turning to the Lakers in 2018, he won the championship again in 2020, with three championships in four years. Now McGee is the champion center.

Many people have indeed asked him this question. When he was bought out and returned home with a contract of 44 million, did he consider retiring? After all, he will never get the money again. And his own answer is that he hopes people remember a warrior who stands up from difficulties again and again, rather than a coward who gives up immediately when encountering setbacks. These proud qualities come from the teachings my mother has taught him since childhood. No matter what difficulties she encounters, she must be self-reliant and not let them take you down.

So, when Dallas gave up again in 2022, Dallas still needs to pay the remaining contract in the next five years. The remaining part of this three-year, 17 million contract is spread to 2.2 million per year, which is much more than what he earns in Puerto Rico and Australia, but his choice is to continue playing basketball..

The same sentence, "They think I should retire, but I think I can continue to play, and I can still play good games, so why listen to them?"

In everyone's eyes, McGee is a different role. He has always been in the middle of being overrated and underrated. He became a joke because of his funny face and unconscious actions, but he eventually became an important puzzle for the champion team.

In the dispute with O'Neal, McGee doesn't seem to be a joke, but perhaps this is his brightest background: what my mother taught him is to fight the world tenaciously, whether it is poor or rich, to be firm in her beliefs and continue to fight for the basketball she loves.

The mother who took him all over the world played until she was 36 years old before she retired. So like her mother, McGee, who played in Dallas, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and won gold medals in the Olympics, wanted to follow her mother's footsteps, travel around the world, and feel the story of the bond between basketball and him.

"What my mother told me is to firmly follow the deepest love in my heart and maintain the resilience to persevere in difficulties."

Welcome to our WeChat official account "Houchang Village Sports Team" to see more NBA and CBA-related archaeology, comments and character content>>

(Text/Wenruo)