Mavs fans are using their imagination while Hardy learns to harness his.
The Dallas Mavericks had three picks in the top 40 in the 2020 NBA Draft, and as of now, none of them look like playoff rotation players. Josh Green, a wing with some defensive versatility and passing feel, still has a chance, though his offensive ceiling is limited. The others, Tyrell Terry and Tyler Bey, are already out of the league. Local fans wanted Desmond Bane, having played in Fort Worth at TCU. The fact that the rising star was “in their own backyard” has haunted Mavs fans, as did Bane’s statements on how he would have embraced Dallas. One pick after Green went Saddiq Bey and, a little later, Tyrese Maxey. In comparison, Green is made to look worse; taken around him were the secondary creators Dallas now needs.
I bring all of this up because it was the final, damning draft of former GM Donnie Nelson, a pioneer of European scouting who struggled to draft American-born players. One of the few success stories was Jalen Brunson, who infamously left this offseason for the Knicks thanks in part to another Nelson fixation which became pathetic by the time of his ouster: the pursuit of superstars. Instead of a restricted deal that would have interfered with the “Summer of Giannis” that never came, the front office gave Brunson four years without team control. The rest is Mavs' offseason history.
Enter Jaden Hardy.
The former top-five recruit had a season of rough shooting and turnovers in the G-League, and his stock fell precipitously. Nevertheless, many draft experts remained high on him and deemed his struggles misleading. Though he got a coveted 'green room invite' and was an expected first-rounder, he fell to the second and the Mavericks pounced. The trade-up for him was a no-brainer, especially considering that they were reported to have him nineteenth on their board. I have heard rumblings that even undersells new GM Nico Harrison’s feelings on the player, and he took a part of the team’s free agency exception to ensure Hardy’s contract ends under team control. It’s a move that can’t help but feel poetically linked to Brunson’s peculiar blunder.
There’s natural excitement about the first pick of a new administration, but circumstances around Hardy feel…different. Brunson was the first real, efficient shot-creating partner of the Luka Doncic era, which had been defined by his heliocentric usage and Kristaps Porzingis’s inefficient elbow game. With Brunson’s exit, and with back-of-the-rotation guard minutes (alarmingly) open, Hardy attracts a kind of wonder and expectation that's both dangerous and exciting, which matches his tantalizing tape.
Throughout the process, I was lower on Hardy for the same reasons as others; he profiled as a defensively-challenged microwave scorer who might struggle to impact winning, as well as a player with turnover and shot selection issues early in the G-League season. As the season wore on, he rediscovered his shot, and his natural creativity for getting it off cleanly had never left. Even as that scoring package came back, I still saw a Buddy Hield-like ceiling: a mixture of a good frame and wingspan with versatile shooting (movement, step-backs, pull-ups), as well as legitimate range which makes the arc — and not the space just within it — the crest of a stretched defense.
Unfortunately, I also saw the same limitations Hield has as a creator, for self or others, whether because of Hardy’s inability to finish, his turnovers, or his tunnel vision. Even at Hardy’s late-season best, those remained weaknesses. Hield himself has never created above-average rim pressure or been more than a tertiary playmaker. Obviously, the career of Hield anywhere after the top 10 is a success, and Hardy slowly rose into the top 20 on my board. Still, as I watched more tape, I realized there are pathways to both a more versatile scoring package and the playmaking which stems from it.
Hardy’s biggest development within the G-League was not that his shot went in, but rather the reawakening of the attacking success he had in high school. He was, after all, asked to be a primary creator for the Ignite team in a gambit to develop him accordingly. It's another reason to excuse the difficulty of his adaptation, as well as a fair explanation for why he improved as the season went along. He does not have an elite initial burst with ball-in-hand but has a certain wiggle and craft that helps him find his spot in the middle of the court. I don’t think the aesthetic quality of his game — a herky-jerky style of wiry-limbed high dribbling — makes his movements easy to guess or mirror, and at his most instinctual he’s able to slide into small spaces, change his pace unconventionally and use the screener to snake his way into the paint.
If Hardy had that attacking guile going back to high school, what was holding him back from weaponizing it? I think, on a basic and intuitive level, he simply hasn’t mastered leveraging his natural creativity with a moment-by-moment sense of how to channel advantage creation into buckets, either for himself or for others. An example of this could be euro-stepping into a defender as if he pre-selected the move rather than countered with it. It seems that the shot selection and turnovers result from a similar lack of control, like his skills are evolving faster than his basketball brain can make order of. He’s almost suggesting creating space is an end unto itself; “I can split this double, so why shouldn’t I?”. He’s a simmering pot that has not yet been brought to a boil, and I believe it’s a good problem to have. As of now, his handle is loose and inconsistent, but he can just as easily string three of four moves together as he can dribble the ball off his foot. Like with art, imagination is the aspect of talent that cannot be taught.
Hardy's finishing, which was inefficient even as his shot turned around, might be a result of that overstuffed ability meeting physical force head-on. For stretches, Hardy would settle for difficult step-backs like he was afraid to encounter the same brick wall against which he was missing. Other times, he’d use that wiggle to get deep, almost too deep, before not knowing exactly what to do when he’d arrived. He seemed to have the ability to get there if he wanted it, even if the results were lacking, and perhaps as the game slows he can intuitively decide upon a finish in the process of rising off the ground. In other words, it seems that he needs his assessment of the rim event to slow down and allow him to choose a finish, rather than a lack of touch. Physicality doesn’t necessarily concern me either. His frame bodes well; his shoulders look almost padded, arched like a gargoyle, a shell of armor waiting to be stretched out into functional muscle.
In the first 80-or-so percent of his first Summer League game, having already faced professionals up to a decade older in the G-League, Hardy looked confident and ahead of the defense. He drove downhill and welcomed contact with a clear plan for how he would finish. He lived in the middle of the court whether by sharp angle, screen, or dribble-move. His intention always seemed to either put himself in spaces that he found comfortable, or which were uncomfortable for the defense. Rather than letting his handle scribble himself across the backcourt, searching for a sketch of what an advantage looks like, he sniffed out the real thing.
What this intention means for him as a creator, ultimately, will be most maximized if he uses it to play make. It’s what will separate him from a Jordan Clarkson, or 2021 draft year doppelganger, Cam Thomas. It was also a pre-draft bugaboo that like many inefficient, non-passing scorers, he would be destined to selective usage, away from crunch time. Hardy’s passing, though, seems to be yet another light at the end of a tunnel that starts with his penetration.
Remember how, once Neo learned to stop bullets in “The Matrix”, he could then fly, multiply, and even stop death? In the first Summer League game, Hardy hit shooters in the corner in ways that didn’t replicate the genius of a Luka: it didn’t have to. His intent had become rim pressure, which became simpler reads. Somewhere, someone is open when penetration alters the structure of the defense (something Hardy will find easy in Dallas’ five-out offense). Again, it’s a matter of mentality. A mentality that at the end of every created scoring advantage, there is usually a teammate who can eat too, and Hardy lets you glimpse a reality where he locates that man regularly.
The Mavericks seem to be almost irrationally sure that Hardy can fulfill his promise. Right now, they have two players above him on the depth chart who could be described as good offensive initiators. One is a Slovenian superstar and the other is Spencer Dinwiddie, who is a good player but not exactly dependable. The offseason isn't over, but there's a feeling that Hardy might be thrust into responsibility in a way that is unconventional for both a conference finalist and a second-round pick. Perhaps the belief is not that he's ready, but that baptism by fire is the best way to learn. If head coach Jason Kidd’s developmental principles are anything like his approach to timeouts, that could be the case.
Stretches like the end of that first Summer League game make such rookie year responsibility sound clinically insane. Hardy tried foolishly to split doubles, drove into crowds without an escape hatch and reacted to help with indecisiveness. His high handle got away from him as he geared up for what was sure to be a combo of moves. That last bit is the instructive sequence; he's too... ingenuitive about the very idea of dribbling a basketball to be bad at it, even as he's sloppy and careless. Perhaps a ball-handling legend as an assistant coach might help.
Mavericks fans reacted to the showing on social media with a kind of ironically-distanced excitement (“move over, Luka”) that, like most irony, gives away a sneaky sincerity. It had been a hard offseason. A free agent rejected them again, this time one who’d already made memories with the team and city. The franchise's draft history is as dark, and one of the few picks Dallas has nailed was that same free agent. Maybe this time hope, which can be a dangerous thing, wasn’t so misplaced.
Or, maybe it’s easy to dream of a player for whom talent — in and of itself — has never been the question. We’ve seen such players fail, sure, but the Mavericks have rarely prized that mercurial quality. It’s been a franchise defined by Euros, NBA-ready collegiate grinders like Brunson, the trading of draft picks and a kind of contract roulette that shuffled in solid role players. It was an approach that always felt like the prioritization was a decent floor, first and foremost. Hardy is something else. He's a Maverick whose ceiling you can’t quite see the top of, even as you catch glimmers of it when you squint, and a player whose reach meeting his grasp seems dependent only upon his self-actualization. As he said after the aforementioned game: "I don't want to prove people wrong. I want to prove myself right.”
Comments