Tim Hardaway Jr. has been an off again, on-again entry on my exclusion list, which is the OFFICIAL document that dictates which players are too good to appear on my channel and which players are NOT too good. Some years, he looks like a premier scoring talent who can go toe-to-toe with other elite shooting guards strictly in terms of putting balls into holes. Other years, he’s an inefficient chucker who only stops shooting when his coach benches him.
This year is more of the latter. He’s averaging ten points per game on sub-40% shooting (actually 37% as of this writing), which is DTB levels of scrubbiness no matter how much rationalizing I attempt to do. I think I was justified in exclusioning THJ from my channel when he was putting up nearly twenty a game for the Knicks (on 39% shooting, LMAO [loving my amused orations]), but those numbers seem so aberrant now that it’s like the timelines of two dimensions got switched around. The real dimension where THJ is a mediocre volume scorer who will never get a leading role on a team, and an alternate dimension where THJ is a mediocre volume scorer who can trick coaches into giving him lots of minutes.
So, THJ highlights it is. I can’t say I’m happy about it, but there is a sense of bringing a long-lost wayward brother back into the fold. Welcome back, bro. You deserve it.
(P.S. I have totally started typing up my exclusion list and I should be able to have it done before the end of the season. By then, it won’t exactly be relevant anymore, but nobody will be able to say that DownToBuck is a promise-breaker. I’m not DownToBreakPromises over here.)
(P.S.S. ESPN blatantly tried to sabotage this video by showing a lame infographic instead of Hardaway making a layup. Joke’s on them, they’re the ones who are losing money hand-over-first by broadcasting like fifty Warriors games this season)