T-Mac grabs NBA Live 07 cover

The NBA Finals may have just wrapped up last night, but Electronic Arts is already starting to market its next NBA-licensed game. Tracy McGrady of the Houston Rockets was announced today as the cover athlete for NBA Live 07, which will likely ship near the tip-off of the 2006-2007 NBA season in late October.

McGrady has been awarded many honors during his nine-year career and is considered one of the league's premier players. The 27-year old was drafted straight out of high school and went on to lead the NBA in scoring in 2003 and 2004. He's dropped 62 points in a game and, in one of the greatest individual performances in NBA history, scored 13 points in the final 35 seconds of a game, leading his team to victory when many had given up.

The announcement of McGrady didn't come as a surprise to most. T-Mac has been prominently featured as the player model in EA's NBA Live demos, which took center stage for a portion of Sony's pre-E3 press conference earlier this year. McGrady previously had his own mobile game, T-Mac Streetball.

Perhaps the new cover honor bestowed will help McGrady follow in the footsteps of last year's NBA Live cover athlete, Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, who eschewed any notion of the "EA cover curse." Wade led the Heat to the franchise's first NBA championship and earned NBA Finals MVP honors last night.

Gamers will be able to get their first look of NBA Live 07 in action soon, according to the game's Web site. On June 23, EA's Web site will show off the game's commercial, which makes its television debut during the June 28 NBA Draft.

NBA Live 07 is set to be released on the Xbox 360, Xbox, PlayStation 2, PSP, and PC. Today's announcement made no mention of the PlayStation 3 version, which was previously confirmed as a launch title for the console.