Vince Carter reaches the Hall of Fame, with grace alongside his jaw-dropping verticality

“‘Zo? Yeah, I got him. (Dikembe) Mutombo? Got him twice. Got the big dude in Indiana, (Rik) Smits. Got Dale Davis, too. Haven’t gotten (Patrick) Ewing yet.” Then, he paused and smiled.

“We play them on Tuesday.”
— Vince Carter, “Fresh Vince,” Sports Illustrated, Feb. 28, 2000

Even watching it live, with his own eyes, in person, it took Shareef Abdur-Rahim a minute to comprehend what he’d just witnessed.

“The thing is, you think of any, just, miraculous play, where you’ve never seen someone do that, make a play like that,” Abdur-Rahim said, 24 years later. “(Derek) Jeter diving. It was like one of those plays. I was on the bench, and it was so quick. He just did it, and you were like, ‘Man, did he really do that?’

“And then looking around, and seeing it again. Even when we went to the locker room, you didn’t get replays that fast. There wasn’t cell phones. It took time to see that again. You’ve never seen anyone do that, do that in a game, this quick, that fast, that reactive. You almost weren’t sure what you’d seen.”

This is what Vince Carter did, in a basketball game, where they kept score and called fouls and everything, to a man who played basketball for France named Frédéric Weis.

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And that was the miracle of Vince Carter, through two-plus decades on the stage. His level of explosive greatness was so unapproachable that it made otherwise sane men question what they’d just seen, for what they’d just seen was impossible. It is why, though his teams rarely were serious contenders for championships during his NBA-record 22 seasons, Carter was an easy selection to this year’s incoming class for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and will be inducted in Springfield, Mass., tonight.

Carter, though, often seemed uninterested in the machismo aspect of dunking that was so intoxicating to so many others in the game. (Famously, he liked being in his high school band, where he played saxophone and was a drum major.) The trappings of superstardom didn’t seem to appeal much to him, either. Part of that was just his demeanor; he rarely raised his voice on the court or called attention to himself off it.

“My junior year in high school, I averaged 25, 26 points a game, whatever it was,” Carter said Saturday, when I asked him about his career-long demeanor of not seeking the spotlight, despite his expansive physical gifts.

“We lost in the state finals,” he continued. “My senior year, I make the McDonald’s (All-American) Game, I averaged three to four points less. (People asked), ‘What’s wrong with Vince?’ My scoring went down, but my rebounding went up, my assists when up. My other teammates’ scoring went up. And we won the state championship.

“So I understood at a young age how important your guys you have on your team (are), and how important it is to empower them. As a superstar, and becoming a role player, I understood my role as a superstar: yes, they need me to score. But I need them. I could score 50 points, and we could lose by 30. So what?”

Still, few did big moments like Carter.

Abdur-Rahim, like Carter, was an Olympian in 2000, part of the prohibitively favored U.S. men’s team, which was playing a preliminary game against France in Sydney. Weis, France’s center, stood 7-foot-2. Carter, 6-6, didn’t seem to take that into account when he jumped over Weis, and dunked on his bean.

France went on to win the silver medal, while the U.S. team won gold. No matter. The French media dubbed Carter’s leap over Weis Le Dunk De La Mort — The Dunk of Death.

“I’d seen him since he was 15, 16 years old,” Abdur-Rahim said. “I thought, I’ve seen him do everything. In our McDonald’s All-American dunk contest, he did every single dunk that had been done in an NBA dunk contest — from the free throw line, between the legs. Seventeen years old. He did every single one of them. The part that amazed me was I thought I’d seen him do everything in a game where I’m like, oh, my goodness. It was so fast and it was something you’d never seen before.”

Carter always had those kinds of moves in his bag.

“We were in practice one day,” recalled Sam Mitchell, whose first head-coaching job in the NBA came in 2004, in Toronto.

“We were scrimmaging. Vince gets the rebound and takes off. He gets to half court and throws the ball up ahead. I said, ‘What the hell?’ The ball hits off of the backboard. He catches it and dunks it. I told everybody, go home. It was my second practice. What the f— did I just see? He throws it underhand. Next thing, I see the m—–f—– catch the ball and dunk. I said to everybody, ‘Get the f— out. I gotta go home and have a drink and process this s—.’”

There was, of course, Carter’s bravura performance at the 2000 NBA Dunk Contest, when he overpowered a weekend-long deluge in the Bay Area to electrify the crowd at Oracle Arena with a series of dunks that may have — may have — only been topped by Michael Jordan’s battle in Chicago with Dominique Wilkins in 1987. There was a 50-burger against the 76ers in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. There was, much later in his career, a signature game-winning shot when he played for the Mavericks, in their first-round series against San Antonio in 2014.

“The best moment was when he was with the Suns” the year before, recalled former Mavericks majority governor Mark Cuban.

“We were playing them, I think it might have been our outdoors (preseason) game. He gave me the ‘come get me’ look. That summer I called his agent, and we made it happen. Vince is a legend. I’m proud of him.”

During the 1999 lockout, recalled Jerome Williams, a teammate of Carter’s in Toronto for three-plus seasons, the two played in New York City with future Raptor teammate Mark Jackson in a charity game, the Wheelchair Classic.

“It was crazy,” Williams said. “Seeing VC jump out the gym with power and grace on his dunks was mesmerizing. I truly believed he had Jesus Christ himself touch his legs to generate that much power. I knew he was destined for the Hall of Fame from that moment.”

Carter even held everyone’s attention when he wasn’t playing at all, setting off a firestorm when that Raptors-76ers series went to a Game 7. The game was scheduled for late Sunday afternoon. But Carter was determined to attend his graduation from North Carolina in Chapel Hill Sunday morning, when he received the degree in African-American Studies he’d earned the fall before. He got the degree, got on then-owner Larry Tanenbaum’s plane, and got to Wells Fargo Center five hours before tipoff. But Carter only shot 6 of 18 from the floor, missing the potential series-winner at the buzzer, setting off frenzied debate about whether he’d made the right decision.

Carter told me that summer that he’d do it all over again, the exact same way.

“And when I do think about it, I’m proud,” he said. “Proud of the way I was able to fight through it and just handle myself in the manner that some people wouldn’t. It was a special time for me, and I wasn’t gonna let anybody spoil it. And yes, it was spoiled by a missed shot. But you miss shots all the time. There’s gonna be times in your career when you’re gonna miss those shots again and again, and there’s gonna be times when you’re gonna make them, and you’re gonna be a hero. And nobody says nothing but ‘Hey, it was a great day.’”

There are many people who were responsible for basketball succeeding in Toronto after the birth of the expansion Raptors in 1995. There were those directly linked to the team, such as Isiah Thomas, Damon Stoudamire, Chris Bosh — and Carter’s cousin, Tracy McGrady, drafted by Toronto out of high school in 1997.

There were players from Toronto and from the nearby suburbs who helped the game gain traction in a city besotted by its beloved Maple Leafs, players such as Jamaal Magloire and Rick Fox and Leo Rautins. Steve Nash, who grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, had enormous influence nationwide, too, as he won back-to-back league MVP awards.

But Carter’s six-plus seasons in Toronto, after a draft-night trade with Golden State in 1998, made the Raptors appointment viewing. There would be quarters, sometimes halves, where Carter did more to fit in, to be a good teammate, than put his eye-popping skills on display. And then …Vinsanity would happen.

When the Grizzlies left Vancouver for Memphis in 2001, Carter and the Raptors had Canada all to themselves.

“When Charles Oakley joined the team (in 1998), there was one game,” recalled Walker Russell, an assistant coach for the Raptors early in Carter’s career. “He (Carter) was shooting jumpers, wasn’t hitting them, Finally, they called timeout. Oak said, ‘Man, ‘Take one more m—-f—– jump shot. One more. You take one more m—–f—— jump shot!’ Vince walked to the bench, didn’t know what to do.

“After the timeout, he went back in, they went back to playing. He went to the hole, dunked on two dudes. Came back, got another one. Boom. Dunk. Then, came back, got fouled, tried to do this other dunk. Turned the whole game around. The other team called timeout. Oak grabbed him and said, ‘See? Can’t nobody can guard your m—–f—— ass if you go to the hole!’ That’s when ‘Half Man, Half Amazing’ came into effect, that day.”

During his time with the Raptors, Carter won Rookie of the Year in 1999, made six of his eight All-Star teams, averaging 23.4 points and 5.2 rebounds.

“He had a six- or seven-year run in Toronto where, ultimately, Kobe became the guy” in the league, Abdur-Rahim said. “But he was right there as far as the best perimeter player in the league.”

But Carter wanted to make the game easier for others as much as he sought the spotlight.

Part of it was playing for Dean Smith at North Carolina. But, Michael Jordan played at Chapel Hill, and for Smith, too. Both had sick hops; both were grounded in Smith’s fundamentals. But where Jordan embraced the Alpha Male aspect of dominating through verticality, Carter seemed more reluctant to stand out, buying fully into the Carolina Way.

“It was one way,” Carter said on the “Knuckleheads” podcast in 2022 with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles.

“We’re playing for the regular-season championship, ACC championship, deep in the (NCAA) tournament,” Carter said. “That’s just what it was. It was bigger than you, the individual, (was) what you had to understand. They always talk about the Carolina system, but you learn how to play the game. That’s what kept me around for 20-some years, honestly, learning how to play the game.”

With an assist from Tracy McGrady on one attempt, Carter put on one of the greatest dunk contest performances in the event’s history at the 2000 All-Star Game. (Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE via Getty Images)

That would help explain why Carter does not dominate the NBA’s all-time leaders’ lists. Some of his highest marks in the stats reflect … attendance.

He’s third all-time in games played, at 1,541, trailing only Robert Parish (1,611) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1,560). He’s 15th all-time in minutes played (46,367). But he’s just 21st all-time in points scored, at 25,728. He only had five career triple-doubles, though he was a willing and quite good passer.

He was a very good shooter from deep during his career, but his best days as an offensive force were well before the NBA’s 3-point revolution, so he was far from a volume shooter; he took more than five per game in only three of his 22 seasons. His career PER of 18.63, according to basketball-reference.com, is only 136th-best in NBA history.

But, here’s the rub. Carter’s 18.63 is the same as Scottie Pippen’s. And no one would question Pippen’s place in the Hall.

Why? Because Pippen has six rings.

“A lot of people think he didn’t work because he was so gifted,” Russell said. “What they don’t know is that every night during the season, we’d be in the gym about 11:30 at night until about 1, 1:15. Every night. And he worked on everything: post ups, running hooks, right hand, left hand. That’s why he could do everything. I think the last part of his career, the last six years, he depended strictly on the fundamentals. Because he had all of that. Didn’t nobody know that. He’d be at the gym. And he liked to come at night, him and his little security guard, Peanut.”

Sean Marks, now the Brooklyn Nets’ general manager, had played against Carter in college, at Cal-Berkeley, in 1998. Taken in the second round of the ’98 draft by the Knicks, Marks went to Toronto along with Oakley in the trade with Toronto for Marcus Camby.

“He did stuff in practice that would be incredible,” Marks said. “It wasn’t just the dunks. It was how fluid he moved, how easily the game came to him. I mean, he worked at it. But the God-given talent. To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. The stuff we were privy to in practice, games would stop, because it was so awe-inspiring.

“One practice, he and Tracy gave us a little demonstration of what they were going to do in the dunk contest. And we’d seen some things. And then, when these two (started), they were like kids in a candy store. What were they, 20 years old? You’d finish a two-hour practice, and these guys would put on a dunk show for the next 45 minutes. … It was like me playing on a Nerf hoop at home with my 5-year-old.”

Carter seemed to like the challenge of testing his limits, to see what was physically possible, as much as the games themselves.

“One time we were playing and I drew up a play for him at the end of a game,” Mitchell said. “And Vince did some crazy, stepback fadeaway shot, instead of just a 1-2, pullup jumper, go straight up. And afterward, I said, ‘Vince, what the hell? Why’d you take that shot?’ He said, ‘Coach, the 1-2 was too easy.’ The game was too easy for him.

“I think he got bored sometimes. I think by the time he got to his sixth year in the league, he knew that.”

Said Marks: “He genuinely loved being a showman. I think sometimes he enjoyed surprising himself. He was that good. He told us (before a game), ‘Today, I’m going to catch Dikembe.’ And he did it, it wasn’t in an arrogant sort of way. It was like, I want to see if I can do this. Like, let’s go to the park and see if I can pull off this move. But he was doing it in front of 20,000 people.”

“What ifs” followed Carter throughout his Toronto tenure. What if McGrady had stayed with his cousin, rather than going to Orlando to team with Grant Hill in 2000? What if Carter hadn’t become disillusioned with the Raptors’ ownership and front office by the time Toronto took Bosh in the ’03 draft? Who knows what could have been? Infamously, of course, Carter forced his way out of town in 2004 via a trade to the Nets that led to a decade of recriminations and hurt feelings, with Carter getting lustily booed every time he returned to Air Canada Centre.

“That was my first year being a head coach, being a young coach,” Mitchell recalled. “The team flew me down to Florida to see him. He said, ‘Coach, I hate this is happening to you. I have no issue with you. I’ll give you the opportunity. But my unhappiness is with the organization, and they know what it is.’

“He hated that I was getting caught in the middle of it. He said, ‘I will never ask you to compromise your beliefs for me.’ And he didn’t. He wasn’t a distraction. He didn’t disrespect me. He didn’t do anything. I hated it was like that, because one of the things that you loved about the job was you were getting to coach Vince Carter.”

Carter had occasional big moments in Jersey, and in Dallas. As ever, given his personal equilibrium, he willingly became a sixth man for the Mavericks and Grizzlies later in his career. He kept feeling good, so he kept playing, year after year, for Orlando and Phoenix and Sacramento and Atlanta. He only retired after the 2019-20 season because COVID-19 shut down the league’s non-playoff teams for nine months, including Carter’s Hawks, something from which a 43-year-old couldn’t bounce back.

But the body of work, and the work of Carter’s body, had already made his Springfield case open and shut. The bad times in Toronto have been overcome; the Raptors announced last month that they’ll be retiring Carter’s number 15 on Nov. 2.

“I loved playing the game,” Carter said Saturday. “It wasn’t about the numbers. I read all the time, ‘If he had just …’ I can’t imagine not playing 22 years, and looking at Year 17, and how miserable I probably would have been (not playing). Because I still had the love for the game. And it wasn’t about numbers. If they called me to come play for a team and sit for a championship, I’d chase one now. But it wasn’t about that. Because I still felt that I was going to put the work in at 42, 43 years old to go play. And it felt good to go on the court, and a 19- 21-, 25-year-old comes in there. And they’re like, ‘he’s old.’

“And I’d be like, let’s line it up. Let’s see if I still have it.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Carmen Mandato / Getty; Sam Forencich / NBAE; Ned Dishman / NBAE via Getty Images)