The Mavericks didn’t really miss Tim Hardaway Jr. Wednesday night in Portland. As far as these things go, it was an ideal situation for the team’s first game without their top bench scorer, who broke his foot in a blowout loss to the Warriors. The Trail Blazers were missing a sizable chunk of their rotation (Damian Lillard, most notably, but also key contributors Nasir Little, Larry Nance Jr., Robert Covington, Cody Zeller, and Dennis Smith Jr.). Plus, on the Mavs’ side, the threes were falling all night, and the ball was moving on offense—Luka Doncic and Jalen Brunson both finished with double-digit assist totals.
So, yeah, the Mavs didn’t miss Hardaway because they didn’t need him all that much to easily beat a Blazers team kicking the tires on tanking the rest of the season. But they will.
Hardaway has been largely a forgotten man this season, generally talked about for what he hasn’t been doing more than what he has. Signing a new deal in the offseason should have solidified his role in the team’s hierarchy, as well as his membership in Jason Kidd’s three-man leadership council, along with Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis.
But he has largely taken a backseat role to Brunson, who is ensconced (correctly) in the starting lineup and seems to be, from this outsider, as much of a leader as anyone on the entire squad, the floor general making sure the vibes are indeed immaculate. Brunson’s increasing prominence, on the court and off, has coincided with a slight dip in THJ’s production, at least as far as the totals and percentages he’s put up during his time in Dallas. You’re hearing fans complain about Hardaway in a manner they largely abandoned after the first 13 games of the 2019-20 season, when his insertion in the starting lineup gave him and the team a boost.
Because of Brunson’s rise and the presence in the rotation of someone like Reggie Bullock, it might feel like losing Hardaway indefinitely—a similar break essentially ended Roddy Beaubois’ nascent career in Dallas—is not as big of a deal as it is. Let me assure you this is not the case. I don’t want to delve too deeply into how the team might replace Hardaway right now, whether it be through trade or a rejiggering of its rotation. The trade deadline is coming up; we will know the answer soon enough.
I just want to take a moment, here, to focus on the what rather than the how, to pay tribute to what Hardaway does better than anyone on the team and what the team absolutely needs to figure out how to replace if it has any aspirations beyond another first-round exit.
First off—and I know this doesn’t win any playoff games, but it connects to everything else—Hardaway might have the most aesthetically perfect jump shot of anyone in the league, not just the Mavericks. He bounces straight up, fast, like he’s inside a pneumatic tube, and he releases the ball from the very tip-top of his jump. His upper body looks like a spot illustration of the correct shooting form found in an instructional manual. The resulting shot has a high, insistent arc, like it was launched from a catapult behind a moat, aimed at the ramparts of a medieval castle. This is a jump shot on which you would use a wish from a genie.
THJ’s jumper is so pleasing to the eye that it almost doesn’t matter if it goes in. Prior to this season, that hasn’t been a huge concern because it mostly has gone in. In his first two full seasons with the Mavericks, Hardaway shot almost 40 percent from behind the arc on more than seven attempts per game.
But even though his shooting had dropped to around 33 percent on threes in 2021-22, teams still defended Hardaway the same, expecting that, any time now, he would get untracked and return to his prowess from last season, when he had a dozen games where he sank at least five threes and regularly went on runs when it looked like he could swish a medicine ball while Champ and Mavs Man held him upside down by his ankles at midcourt. He’d sink seven, eight in a stretch. Toward the end of the year, he dropped in 10 of 18 in a road win in Miami.
Doncic and Porzingis are streaky shooters, and, to an extent, so are bit players like Trey Burke. No one on the roster is a binge eater like THJ. He’d hit a three, then dribble into a long pull-up two—the kind of shot that goes against analytics and the skill set of most other players on the roster. But with THJ that’s part of the deal, and when he is rolling—and you can feel it when it starts, something about the hard dribble he takes right before rising up—that is a shot you are fine with. And then another three and a hard drive to the basket for an and-one, and, suddenly, what the hell, he’s sitting at 13 points in five minutes, and you have no idea what just happened.
When Doncic goes for 15 in a quarter, it feels like John Wick, occasionally dazzling but brutal. When Hardaway does it, it feels like The Matrix. You look up and the lobby of the building is riddled with bullet holes and bodies. Brunson can’t do that. Reggie Bullock can’t. What sets him further apart is that he doesn’t need anyone’s help to make any of this happen. Hardaway isn’t a gunner curling off an intricate series of screens or standing on the weakside waiting for a skip pass. He doesn’t have to probe the defense to find his opening. He could get his jumper off in a fully occupied Kia Sorrento. He just needs the ball.
This year, though his numbers were down, Hardaway still had the ability to affect the gravity of any team’s defense no matter how many times he missed because he never stopped shooting. Maybe that caused a few fans to grouse in the Mavericks Twitter account’s mentions, but it is necessary. If his jump shots weren’t creating points, they were creating space, pulling the defense his way, opening driving lanes, making help defenders take an extra step in his direction. It affects everything.
In Hardaway’s last game, before he broke his foot on a drive to the basket, he turned in a classic THJ quarter, dropping a quick 10 points in a game where the rest of the offense was off, when the Mavs needed someone to singlehandedly keep them connected. It’s no surprise that once he was helped to the locker room—and it was rough watching him not able to put any weight on that injured foot—the team fell apart on its way to its worst loss of the season.
Those are the nights where Hardaway’s absence will be felt most. He’s been able to rescue games headed in that direction more than a few times during his career in Dallas. You can find solid NBA players ready to catch one of Doncic’s ridiculous passes and finish the play. It’s much more difficult to find someone like Hardaway, who steps on the floor ready to steal lightning every time out.
That’s what we are about to miss.
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