Vince Carter used to be one of the most exciting players to watch in the entire NBA. That point aside, the larger truth about the former dunk contest champion is that he’s been a really solid-to-good player for most of his 16 years in the league. However, like every high-flyer and star before him, it seems that Father Time has not only caught up to Carter, but taken him down with blunt force trauma.
Wednesday night was “grisly” for the Memphis role player who had to log more minutes in light of Tony Allen’s untimely absence from the NBA playoffs. It is very easy to note the effects of time on Carter’s skills after a spectacularly poor Game 5 on Wednesday night against the Golden State Warriors.
Here’s what’s complicated about Carter’s career: Though he descended from a brief position of stardom at the very beginning of this century, he rebuilt his career to make himself a productive player. Now that he’s an old man in athletic terms, where’s his current place — in the NBA, yes, but more urgently, in Memphis’s rotation under head coach Dave Joerger?
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Before his Game 5 struggles, Carter had done a solid job of reinventing himself — it’s something he had to do ever since he became unable to jump over humans in a single bound. The transition from athletic marvel to a solid role player seemed sudden, nearly overnight, while no one was paying attention. However, when Carter left New Jersey for a pit stop in Orlando and then 51 games with Phoenix, it seemed that his career was moving from superstar to “undervalued transitioning-to-old-person journeyman,” and for the most part it has worked well for him.
Carter would eventually land in a more stable home for his talents with Dallas for the 2011-2012 season. It is there that people noticed his transformation from prolific above-the-rim acrobat into a player that could best be described as a type similar to that old guy in your rec league who is good even though no one knows how.
After three rather meaningful seasons with the Mavericks, Carter came to Memphis to add some depth, leadership, and old-man grit to a team which was already full of a lot of the qualities he was going to bring. Regardless, no team can pass up on a player who can truly add 20 minutes a night to the rotation without there being a huge drop in production from starter to bench player.
That’s the best compliment Vince Carter could be given in the latter stages of his career. While he was no longer a true impact player as he was during his heyday, he provided teams a legitimate bench option, and one — more importantly — who wasn’t going to murder all the hard work the first team did while he was on the court.
In this Memphis-Golden State series, however, Vince Carter has not only murdered his teammates’ hard work, but has done so at such a rate that he could be considered Vince Carter, a Serial Killer of Good Things.
To be fair to Memphis, as well as Carter, this isn’t exactly either of their faults. Teams tend to grab “known” good players and ride them until they are no longer able to produce. It wasn’t as though Carter was a bad player for the Grizzlies this season. Going into the Golden State series, there were no reasons to think he would be a detriment to the team to the extent he has been.
If Carter still wants to play basketball and do so for playoff contenders, who am I to judge? Is he supposed to turn down the minutes offered to him, even if he has come to the realization that his body is no longer able to compete with the young legs of the Warriors?
Carter even looked mostly good during the Portland series a round earlier. So, again, this an “is what it is” situation, but what it might now be is a time for Memphis to reduce some of the 38 year-old’s minutes… and drastically so.
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Heading into Wednesday’s game, Carter was 8 for 25 from the field and 1 for 6 beyond the arc. He also got to the charity stripe only once, which helps highlight how he has turned from rim-attacker to jump shooter (“old-man rec-league guy”), but attempting that many shots while going to the free throw line only once isn’t only less than ideal, but downright dreadful.
With the NBA’s fan base shifting to a plus/minus world, though, things didn’t look all that wretched for Carter through his first four games in this series. Memphis saw the aging guard be a +4, -10, +8 and then a -7 in Game 4. That was before he turned in an especially horrific performance in Game 5, which resulted in a -23. That’s right, in just 20 minutes of action in Game 5, Vince Carter managed to be a -23 (not that his teammates were all that better).
Nevertheless, there wasn’t much Memphis could do during this loss. The Grizzlies were without Tony Allen; it is not as though their bench is loaded with better options; and the NBA playoffs are not a place where you are allowed to trade or sign for an upgrade. The Grizzlies, for better or worse (it was worse, mind you), had to ride their “known” quantity to the point where it became painfully obvious that Vince Carter’s new “known” dimension is of a guy who can’t perform on a level which doesn’t hurt his team — at least in this series.
There’s more to this than Carter simply not being able to contribute in ways Memphis would hope. The more concerning aspect of all of this: He seems oblivious to it or not caring what his role should actually be at this point in his career. This is pretty much the opposite of old-man, rec-league guy and more like your buddy who hurls threes at the basket despite being as bad at hoops as Skip Bayless is at formulating reasonable opinions.
A team’s best player(s) should be allowed to shoot out of slumps. However, a guy off the bench, who is mostly there to not hurt the team, should not. That didn’t stop Carter from chucking one ill-fated field goal attempt after another in Game 5.
By the end of the night, Carter’s box score looked like a B-movie script, except it wasn’t meant to look intentionally bad: 3 for 10 from the field, 1 of 6 from deep, one more turnover (2) than assists (1), yet still seeing 20 minutes of action during the game.
At what point of the game should Memphis have pulled Carter? Hindsight says that he probably should never have played to begin with, but that’s incredibly unfair to expect anyone on the coaching staff to have that type of foresight, or, really, come equipped with some sort of ESP. (Allen being injured limited Joerger’s options. Moreover, Nick Calathes is not exactly a good solution to the Grizzlies’ problems.) Still, allowing Carter to continue to jack up shot after shot, very few of which were going in, and not stopping the Vinsanity of it all, wasn’t Joerger’s best coaching job to date. Surely, someone has to tell a player to not take shots away from other, better options on the floor.
Going forward, it is tough to think Memphis will abandon Vince Carter completely. Even if Tony Allen is back for Game 6 (and/or a potential game seven), it is not as though there’s a plethora of better options available. It seems to be, unfortunately, a situation the Grizzlies will have to ride out no matter what happens for the rest of this series, and potentially beyond.
I’m not too sure if this is Vince Carter being done as a player who can perform consistently on the biggest of stages, or if this is as simple as a bad matchup for him in this series. That said, truly, the reason doesn’t matter. There are no series after this one if Carter can’t return to having that comfortable old-man form, which isn’t all that special anyway, but hasn’t cost Memphis much up until this point.
A question I doubt many thought they would ever have to ask during Vince Carter’s career needs to be asked now:
“Vince, got any old-man left in you?”
Or, even more simply:
“Vince, can you stop jacking up so many shots?”
