Rodney McCray (basketball)

McCray attended the University of Louisville and was a key member of the Cardinals team that won the 1980 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship. His college teammates included his brother, Scooter McCray, as well as Darrell Griffith and Derek Smith. McCray qualified for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team but was unable to compete due to the 1980 Summer Olympics boycott. In 2007, he did receive one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the spurned athletes.^[1]

He was drafted by the Houston Rockets with the third pick of the 1983 NBA Draft, playing four seasons with them. Averaging 10.8 points per game in Houston,^[2] he further averaged double-digit scoring in eight of his first nine seasons.^[3] Starting from the Rockets’ 1986 season – when Robert Reid shifted to point guard – McCray took on an expanded role as a forward, with the offense running more frequently through him. Contemporary coverage described him as a point forward,^[4] a role that was rarely defined or discussed at the time.^[5]

In his prime, he was also among the league's elite point-of-attack defenders, earning NBA All-Defensive Team honors in 1987 and 1988, as well as a trip to the NBA Finals in 1986 in a losing cause against Larry Bird's Boston Celtics.^[6] In 1988, he was traded to the Sacramento Kings with Jim Petersen in a package for Otis Thorpe. In 1990, he was traded to the Dallas Mavericks for Bill Wennington. He spent his final season with the Chicago Bulls after being dealt to them in a three-team trade.^[7] He finished his career by winning an NBA championship ring with the Bulls in 1993.^[6]