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Even though the New York Knicks just gave him a new four-year $71 million contract this offseason, it seems that it isn't enough for Tim Hardaway Jr. to forget his bitter exit from the team earlier in his NBA career. In an interview with Brian Mahoney of the Associated Press, the second generation NBA pro opened up about how he felt when he and the Knicks cut ties at the end of the 2014-15 season, when he was traded to the Atlanta Hawks for guard Jerian Grant.
”It definitely left with a bad taste in my mouth and just to have that opportunity to come back here is very rare, so you've got to make the most of that,” Hardaway said Monday.
Selected 24th overall in the 2013 NBA Draft by the Knicks, Hardaway averaged 10.8 points per game on 40.8 percent shooting from the field in his first two years in the league. While his first season in Atlanta uniform was a testy one, putting up a paltry 6.4 points nightly on just 16.9 minutes per game, Hardaway followed that up with his best season to date.
During the 2016-17 campaign, Hardaway sort of became a breakout star for the Hawks, as he showed capacity to become a go-to scorer, recording 14.5 points on 45.5 percent shooting from the floor and 35.7 percent from the three-point region in 79 games, including 30 starts.
Now that he's back in the Big Apple, though, Hardaway is looking to make a bigger impact on the team than in his first stint with the Knicks, especially with the team finally appear to be rid of the Triangle Offense that ex-Knicks president Phil Jackson deemed Hardaway as unfit of being part of.
”I think I can really excel in this type of offense, rather than when I was in my second year in the league,” he said. ”But that was learning a new offense, learning a new system and that staff, they didn't draft me, so it was different. I can see this being more like my rookie type of season but being more mature, being able to take bigger strides and bigger steps on both ends of the floor.”
