Tim Hardaway Claims He Would Average 40 Points In Today's NBA; Calls Out JJ Redick For Disrespecting 90s Era

Tim Hardaway Sr. was one of the premier point guards of the 1990s, being named a five-time All-Star for his stints with the Golden State Warriors and Miami Heat. As the modern game has evolved, Hardaway believes that his game today would lead to him being one of the best players in the NBA, averaging 40 points and playing a similar style of basketball to Stephen Curry. 

Hardaway made the claim on former Warriors head coach Mark Jackson's podcast.

"40 easy. I get to shoot 15 threes a game; I'm like Steph Curry. I'm like Steph Curry right now. It'll be hard to deal with me right now, 40 easy."

Hardaway was phenomenal in his prime, averaging 23.4 points on 46.1% from the field and 41.1% from three in his best season in 1991-92 with the Warriors. However, saying he'd average 40 just because of how the modern NBA is asinine. 

He compared himself to Stephen Curry when even Curry hasn't averaged 40 points a game, averaging 30.1 points in his unanimous MVP 2015-16 season.

The closest we've seen any player to averaging 30 is James Harden in 2018-19, when he averaged 36.1 points. Even he couldn't crack the 40-point barrier, nor have the best players of this era like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid, Luka Doncic, and other scoring champions. 

Hardaway was great and he might be averaging over 25 points on a Playoff team in the modern day with his skill set, but for him to claim he'd be among the best players in the world is completely baseless.

Hardaway is a proponent of his era being the toughest to play basketball in, also slamming Lakers head coach JJ Redick for old comments about previous generations of basketball players not matching up with today.

"And then JJ Redick, he said that he was mediocre; I don't even know what he said, but, man, please, he couldn't even play back then. In the park district, we wouldn't have him playing back then. We wouldn't even have them in the court. He could only dribble; that's all he could do—dribble. I mean, the only thing he could do is shoot; he couldn't even dribble the basketball, man."

"It irked me when nobody ever played in that era. How are you going to talk about that era? So you can't talk about that era; you never being in the physicality that we've been in. You never grew up how we grew up; you never went through the things that we grew up, doing what we endured when we were growing up... A lot of guys were athletic; you telling me Dominique Wilkins wasn't athletic; of course, Michael Jordan, there were a lot of guys that were athletic and could play,"

JJ Redick could most definitely play in the '90s, given his emergence came adjacent to that era in the early-2000s before he joined the NBA in the 2005 NBA Draft. Hardaway retired in 2003, so there isn't much separating the two players. In addition, Redick's comments were mainly aimed toward the older generation of players from the '60s and '70s who are held in high regard compared to modern players.

Hardaway doesn't want to see his era trashed by a modern role-player, but the hard work of guards like Hardaway dynamically evolved the game where players today have better skill sets than the ones before them. The same will happen as the 2010s generation ages out as the players coming out in the future will have more training methods to exploit.

Basketball continues evolving, so to say a player from an older era would dominate the modern era is insane because the players today have built off the knowledge acquired by stars in the '90s, the same as how they borrowed from the stars of the '70s and so on.