Toronto Star: Rap on Carter is legit
slinslin said:
The Raptors are a good defense team. Jalen Rose or not.
Their defensive percent against is pretty good (42.9%) but the recent criticisms of Vince Cartyer suggest that he has not been playing hard lately.
Toronto Star: Rap on Carter is legit
The game was inconsequential, the season long laid to rest. So when Vince Carter waltzed into the lane yesterday, drawing a foul en route to the bucket, the post-whistle elbow to Vinsanity's chest seemed more than a little gratuitous.
But then, Antonio Davis has always been addicted to making public statements. And on a day when the old quote machine made headlines by criticizing Carter's off-season work ethic, maybe he couldn't resist taking a literal shot at his former teammate.
Carter's response was to throw the ball, rather lightly, at Davis' hip. Matching technical fouls were assessed. And this was as close to high drama as you got on Air Canada Centre's hardwood stage.
Now, you can dismiss Davis as a deserter and a manipulator. You can call him a con man for convincing the Raptors to give him a massive contract when he clearly had no intention of ever fulfilling the deal in the northland.
But you can't argue with this: Davis is among the best self-made players in the league, a guy whose natural talent, if he'd relied on it instead of constantly augmenting it, would have landed him a wonderful career in the European bush leagues. The guy knows what a work ethic looks like, because his has given him everything he owns. So his opinion — that Carter's summertime slacking has led to injury and inconsistency — can't be sloughed off entirely as the ranting of a bitter ex-teammate.
"I know he's not a strong believer in weights and other things like that," said Davis of Carter yesterday, "but you have to prepare your body."
Davis isn't the first ex-Raptor to question Carter's dedication to the craft. Keon Clark said it a while back: "(Carter) doesn't want to work for it." Chris Childs piled on soon after: "You expect more from a leader." Charles Oakley, too, had his round-about take: "Vince's heart beats different."
Maybe you can pooh-pooh each of those guys for various reasons, but Carter, no surprise, doesn't want to hear any of it.
"Antonio Davis is not anybody I worry about," Carter said after he fouled out of a 114-108 overtime loss to the Bulls. "I'm going to approach (the off-season) like I need to approach it. And it's helped me. ... I've been here most of the season and I'm going to continue to do what I need to be effective for this team."
Therein lies the problem, of course. Carter, who has missed nine games to injury this season, thinks showing up "most of the season" is good enough. Carter thinks he's being effective, even though he is shooting a career-low 41.7% from the field; even though he has been guilty of half-speeding it through a raft of outings that haven't come close to justifying his $11 million (U.S.) salary.
And if you're a Raptors fan you can only hope that Carter, to be married this summer, will return next season a new man. You can only hope he won't arrive at training camp and admit, like he did this past autumn, that he'd basically taken the summer off from hard-core self-improvement. You can only hope he'll shake off his career-long aversion to serious weight room work. But excuse the faithless.
Carter, after all, still doesn't seem to understand why anyone would care what he does from May through September. Yesterday he was wondering what all the fuss was about.
"I don't get into childish games," he said.
But Davis, even if he was getting his digs in, wasn't fooling around. He was talking frankly about why Carter's all-star career has stagnated.
And you can only hope Carter, after giving Davis the public shrug-off, will acknowledge a point well made. You can only hope he'll realize he's turning 28 in the middle of next season, that his prime will soon enough turn into his twilight, that all this talk only persists because of all the potential that continues to be squandered.
