Off-court issues aside, there are a lot of similarities between Stephen Jackson and Rashad McCants. Neither guy ever breaks a smile on the court. Their images are both a bit skewed by a public that wants to watch their athletes express themselves through joy. Both guys are hated in the cities they left behind. Both take ill-advised threes and have been accused of hogging the ball.
The comparison is interesting because it exposes just how fickle, specious and arbitrary our impressions can be, especially when they are distilled through what we see in a televised game. While one could match up Stack Jack and Rashad along cosmetic lines—scowling, yelling at teammates, pouting on the bench—the truth about both players gets expressed somewhere we cannot quite see. Captain Jack is one of the most beloved players in the league. His coaches drool over his competitiveness, his leadership and the way he picks up his teammates. None of that is evident to the television audience. Conversely, McCants can’t even get a phone call from Carolina guys like Larry Brown and George Karl.
And yet, if one is to trust the mega story on McCants in ESPN the Magazine, McCants’ exile is predicated largely on his body language and the strange faces he makes while playing.
What, exactly, is the difference between the two? I have no doubt that the difference is real—again, this project is not a fansite for McCants, but rather, a fansite for what McCants means—but it does confirm what we probably already knew and what the hundreds of post-Decision Lebron articles all argued. We, as fans, really have no idea what these guys are like. The ultimate teammate is the same guy who almost got kicked off an Olympic team that was created in his image. The same frowning guy who threw haymakers in the Palace and got himself arrested on a gun charge, is, in fact, the best teammate in the league, while the other frowning guy, who has never been in trouble and won a National Championship, is absolutely toxic. We cannot see these things as fans, and yet all of us, myself heartily included, keep trying to figure the shit out. When we are right, we are randomly right, and when we are wrong, we are randomly wrong.
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