“Snuck Me In The Back Door”: Tracy McGrady Nearly Teamed Up With Michael Jordan In Secrecy

Tracy McGrady (L) and Michael Jordan (R) | Credits- Kim Klement-Imagn Images and IMAGO / Icon Sportswire

In the 1990s, playing alongside Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls was every young player’s dream. For Tracy McGrady, that dream nearly became a reality, and he recently opened up about how close he came to joining the Bulls early on in his career.

During an appearance on Timeless Sports, T-Mac revealed that the night before the 1997 NBA Draft, the Bulls secretly brought him in for a private workout. They were clearly interested in signing him. There’s no denying that. But as with many moments, there are several versions of the same story.

The most popular version is that the Bulls were interested in drafting T-Mac and were willing to trade away Scottie Pippen to make it happen. By then, the tensions within the Bulls organization — especially between Jordan and GM Jerry Krause — were well known, and later captured perfectly in the Netflix docuseries The Last Dance. According to McGrady, Krause was looking to move on from Pippen and saw the young T-Mac as his replacement.

“What a lot of people don’t know about that night is that Jerry Krause was actually trying to make a trade for me and Scottie Pippen in it. And MJ called and axed that whole deal,” McGrady once said on ESPN. Coming back to his recent comment, T-Mac said that he met with the Bulls executives a day before the draft.

“Chicago was looking at me…Before I even got drafted…The night before the draft, I went in for a private workout. They opened up a clinic, it was like midnight. They snuck me in the back door,” McGrady revealed. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out at the time. Years later, when he became a free agent, he went to the Bulls again, but nothing positive happened at that time either.

The big question now is: what if? What if MJ and T-Mac had teamed up in Chicago? Could the league have handled that level of athleticism and scoring on one team? Then again, it might’ve been too much, too soon. Jordan was laser-focused on winning in the moment, while McGrady, still raw at the time, needed space and time to develop.

Why did McGrady leave the Raptors?

T-Mac’s career might not have started with a big team, but he had everything he needed from the beginning. After being drafted by the Toronto Raptors, he got the opportunity to play with his cousin, Vince Carter, for the first three years of his career. However, in 2000, McGrady had to make a tough decision for himself.

When asked how difficult it was to leave Toronto, he said, “There was a lot going on. I didn’t want to leave my cousin if things were in order. There was a lot of things going on with the organization, with the coach, and it wasn’t stable for me.”

T-Mac revealed that the Raptors were against the idea of him joining the Orlando Magic, but he knew it was the right fit. That said, he never truly found a long-term home in the NBA, bouncing from team to team throughout his career. Still, he was one of the most prolific scorers of his era, winning two scoring titles and earning seven All-Star selections. He played his final NBA games with the San Antonio Spurs, retiring in 2013.