Vince Carter: Legacy

9/10/2022

Vince Carter: Legacy comes across as the Antonio Salieri of pro basketball, except that while Salieri (the one in the movie, at least) made up for his mediocrity with malevolence, Carter always desperately lacked the killer instinct necessary to succeed in the NBA; as Charles Barkley puts it, “I'll tell you the biggest problem with Vince Carter. He's a nice guy ... [a great player] would slap his momma to get a rebound." There are of course great players who never won a championship; the film mentions Karl Malone and Patrick Ewing, and I would add, among others, Shawn Kemp, Barkley himself, and even Allen Iverson, who appears in the documentary looking like Martin Lawrence's older brother. What these players had that Vince Carter didn’t was consistency. It’s true that Carter had an u