Tim Hardaway Jr. gets into the Atlanta Hawks rotation

Both were wildly inconsistent, but Hardaway's junior year was so underrated. For the life of people, I can't figure out why people don't appreciate it like they should.

His freshman year he was a key contributor that no one expected.

His sophomore year he had all the summer hype and couldn't handle being the alpha on the team. His shot selection was almost Kobe/October '15 bad. And he couldn't make anything all year.

However, his junior year after Burke moved into the primary role. He flurished, IMO. He became comfortable in his own skin. He went from a wanna be superstar to a "do everything player." His defense could not have been worse his sophomore year. There were times where he just wouldn't even TRY to guard people. Fast forward to his junior year and he was our best perimeter defender.

When teams learned that if you double Burke and get the ball out of his hands we couldn't start our offense --- Hardaway stepped into a PG role and Burke played off the ball. By the time the VCU tournament game roled around and they were trapping Burke in the backcourt, THJ was running the offense for us.

He was never elite, but I'll be damned if he wasn't the glue for that Championship Game team. The guy did it all. Kind of a jack of all trades, master of none kind of guy. Which was perfect when you had the master hustler (McGary), the master interior defender/charge/tough guy (Morgan), and the master 3-point sniper (Stauskas)...those guys all had deficiencies Hardaway could cover up.

To me, Irvin is just an inconsistent player and doesn't impact the game enough when he's not scoring. Then again, he's playing out of position most of the time, so that's hard...just like it was hard for GRIII.