2024-25 Mavericks Player Cards: Jaden Hardy

The 22-year-old has potential, but will the Mavericks give him enough chance to develop?

Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images

This is the first exclusive article for our paid subscribers. Over the past month, I’ve published seven free long-form pieces, totaling more than 10,000 words of analysis, available to everyone. Your support and enthusiasm have been incredibly appreciated.

Looking ahead, I plan to continue delivering 2-3 deep-dives each week during the offseason. As the season kicks off, I will transition to daily pre- and post-game observations, which everyone loved last season.

Thank you for joining me on this journey and for your continued support!

Now, let's dig into Jaden Hardy and explore his potential — exactly the type of nerdy analysis this space was created for in the first place.

Hardy is next in line in our 2024-25 Player Cards series. Like Olivier-Maxence Prosper, the 6-foot-4 guard who turned 22 in July is a player who is more about his potential than what we've seen from him so far. While the question with O-Max is more about what type of player he will eventually become, the question with the two days older Hardy (born on July 3rd, 2002, while Prosper was born on July 5th) is not so much about what role he'll play, but rather how good he can be in it.

This is why the Key question section was the most fun to work on for this specific player card and where most of the thinking and analysis went. You'll find some very intriguing names on both ends of the spectrum that my comparison algorithms spit out, making the Mavericks' job of figuring out exactly what they have on their hands far from easy.

It's not like the Mavericks haven't done this before, though: they faced a similar dilemma with a certain guard, drafted in the second round, who didn't exactly set the world on fire with similar numbers to Hardy in his first two seasons, but is now an All-Star in New York.