“I didn’t know if I was going to be here, if I’m going to be honest with you,” Tim Hardway Jr. said at the Mavericks’ media day in October. There was good reason for that: he had been in trade rumors throughout the offseason, including a scuttled draft-night deal with Phoenix for DeAndre Ayton. As the team reconvened for training camp, where exactly Hardaway fit in Jason Kidd’s plans remained unclear. His inclusion in the starting five was unlikely, and even a prominent role off the bench wasn’t assured. He would be competing for playing time with Josh Green, Seth Curry, Derrick Jones Jr., Jaden Hardy, Dante Exum, and maybe rookie O-Max Prosper, too.
None of this was surprising or unwarranted. Hardaway missed half of the 2021-22 season with a broken foot (though he contributed to the Mavs’ run to the Western Conference finals by cheering from the sidelines like an apex Sports Dad). But it’s not as though the injury took him down in his prime. He had already been mostly inefficient or ineffective prior to swapping his uniform for streetwear, and that continued when he made it back to the court last year.
Given that Hardaway would be 31 when this season tipped off, it seemed like the relevant portion of his career was likely over. Most assumed his first-guard-off-the-bench slot would go to Hardy, who came on at the end of his rookie year and appeared ready to take on the jumpshot-mercenary role. Maybe even Hardaway thought that would be the case. But he never sulked about it. The rest of that media day quote: “I took that time to definitely lock in, control what I could control, work my tail off, stay healthy, and come back better than ever.”
And he has been. Through the first 14 games of the season, Hardaway is averaging more than 18 points, third highest on the team after Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving. It’s almost four points a game more than the past two seasons, and the most he’s scored since joining the Mavs in 2019. He’s shooting 40 percent from behind the arc while taking more than nine attempts per game. Both are career highs and huge numbers for one of the squad’s only true floor spacers, and yet somehow they both strike me as too low. Spiritually, Hardaway has been playing Pop-A-Shot with a grape and a garbage can all year long.
I can’t tell you what the difference is this season. It’s not like Hardaway has ever lacked for confidence. He’s always hunted for his own shot and not been particular about where or when he finds it. I don’t think that has really changed, at least in my viewing. I know I have said, “No … no … YES!” more than a time or two when he’s taken that hard dribble that signals an imminent jumper. (He has scooched back a bit, though. From an analytics perspective, Hardaway’s average shot distance through 14 games, according to Basketball-Reference, is 20.1 feet, the longest of his career.)
And I don’t think he is playing better because the addition of Irving has given him more space. His jumper—featuring one of the most beautiful forms in the league—has never needed more space. If you’ll indulge me, here is what I wrote about it in January 2022, after Hardaway broke his foot:
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.
Because Hardaway pops off the floor on his jumper like he’s doing a plyometrics workout, it essentially means he’s always open. There have been games where it didn’t look like Hardaway had room to stand and he was still able to rise up and hit a three. He could be facing a brick wall and—after getting over my confusion that there was a brick wall on a basketball court—I would still expect him to free himself up for a shot. Hardaway could find a way to get an open look if he and his defender were sharing a tandem bike. He could get his shot off in a rugby scrum. So, again, he might welcome the extra room he gets from Irving, but he doesn’t need it.
I think part of Hardaway’s bounce-back season so far has been (slightly) smarter shot selection and, schematically, a more defined plan of attack: come in like a flamethrower until the net or your shoulder is on fire. But mostly I think this is Hardaway’s version of a revenge body after a break-up. It was right there in that quote before the season even started: after being shopped and nearly dropped, he actually did come back “better than ever.” Nine threes a game is his version of shirtless thirst traps on his Instagram Stories.
For the first time in a long time, the Mavericks enjoyed an offseason filled with quality moves. Accidentally, trying and failing to get rid of their sixth man was one of the best.
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