UNCASVILLE, Conn. – Celebrating the 2022 enshrinees at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame means gathering legends together.
Including three prominent people in Mavericks’ history.
Three?
Allow us to explain.
You probably know longtime coach Del Harris is going into the hall, officially, Saturday night at the enshrinement ceremony in Springfield, Mass. He’s been with the Mavericks organization in some capacity for most of the last 21 years.
But also getting in is Tim Hardaway, who may have only spent one season playing for the Mavericks but has kept close ties that got stronger the minute his son, Tim Hardaway Jr., was acquired.
And then there’s Manu Ginobili.
What? Don’t think he’s an integral part of the Mavericks’ history?
Let’s put it this way: The Mavericks’ first trip to the NBA finals in 2006 probably doesn’t happen without Ginobili.
He’s probably the star of this induction class and with good reason. He’s a true global superstar, even if it’s still OK for Mavericks’ fans to despise him and his San Antonio Spurs’ brethren. And there’s no denying that his foul in Game 7 of the 2006 playoffs against the Spurs saved the Mavericks and pushed them to overtime and spots in the Western Conference finals and, eventually, the NBA finals, where they lost to Miami.
Memories like that are what make the NBA great. Even the hall of famers have moments that don’t go so well.
And then there are the memories like Harris, Hardaway and George Karl, another 2022 inductee, have of the man they all are connected to: Don Nelson, whose fingerprints on this HOF class are impossible to miss.
The nine living members of the 16-person Class of 2022 got together Friday at Mohegan Sun Resort in Connecticut, about 45 minutes from Hartford and an hour down the road from Springfield, Mass., where the hall is located.
They had a celebratory banquet, told stories and shared memories.
For Harris, 85, he could look back on a life well-coached, including being the first NBA coach of Kobe Bryant, leading Shaquille O’Neal during the meat of his career and being the last coach of Magic Johnson.
“To have been his (Bryant’s) first and Magic’s last, and all the guys in between, to think that you’ve coached with all those players –I’ve learned from them, by the way, that’s why I say coached with – that somehow or another I contributed to the game and not just played it or coached, that’s more humbling to me than anything I ever would have thought,” Harris said.
With his signature white hair still looking like it did during his coaching prime, Harris couldn’t help but tell a story about Bryant.
“When we signed Kobe, he was 17,” he said. “Writers asked me, what was your first impression of seeing Kobe. I said, well, I thought he was really cute, but of course, he was only 4 years old because I was his dad’s last coach (in Houston, 1982-83), Joe “Jellybean” Bryant.
“One time he (Kobe) famously said: coach, you know I can beat anybody in the league one-on-one if you’d just move Shaq out of the low post sometimes. I told him: Kobe, your day is going to come, but I’m not doing that yet.”
Harris is going into the hall as a contributor, not as a coach. While he was a successful coach in the NBA (winning 54.9 percent of his games, making it to the NBA finals in 1981), the ABA, college and internationally with five different countries, it was his contributions to the game as a writer, speaker, mentor and innovator over parts of eight decades that got him into the hall after many years of being nominated.
And it came back, as he chatted with media members, to his association with Nelson.
“I was with Nellie nine years, four with the Bucks and five with the Mavericks,” Harris said. “When he started out, he wanted to be a referee. They said OK, we’ll try you out in the summer league in LA. I was assistant coach with the Rockets and Nellie is refereeing in the league. They said, Nellie, you were a nice player, but you’re not going to be a referee.
They were wrong about that. He refereed a lot – on the bench.
That set the wheels in motion for Harris and Nelson to become lifelong friends. The same can be said for Karl. And for Hardaway, who had his best years when Nelson was coaching Golden State during the Run TMC days with Mitch Richmond and Chris Mullin.
It was his fifth time on the ballot
“I got a call from the Hall of Fame – did not want to answer the phone because I did not want to take another rejection,” Hardaway said. “But I said, I got to answer it. So I picked it up and he said: Tim, I have some better news today than I normally have for you. He told me. I told my wife and my kids and parents and then I called Mitch and Chris at the same time.
“And I’m like, yeah fellas, I’m in, I’m in. Chris was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mitch was like, ‘What are you in? What are you talking about.”
The Nelson Hall of Fame tree is sprouting new limbs virtually every year.
“Don Nelson, an innovator, he put a system together where it was unorthodox,” Hardaway said. “Other teams didn’t know how to guard us. We had (their) centers out there guarding (our) centers that were dribbling the basketball and shooting threes. So they had to stay up and guard them. A lot of centers were upset at Nellie and us. I wish it would have lasted longer. But we had lots of fun.”
And then there was Karl, who Nelson mentored throughout the young portion of his coaching career.
“I have no idea why Nellie put me under his wing,” Karl said. “I invited him to come back and be a presenter for me. And he said he’s not coming back (from Hawaii) anymore. And I know Del wants him to be a presenter, too.”
As Harris said: “I don’t think any of us could get Nellie away from Maui.”
It remains a strong coaching tree that Nelson created.
And Karl liked to coach the same way.
“I believe Nellie’s the first guy who played small ball,” Karl said. “I remember one night when we had nine guys on the court under 6-5 because I was refusing to let him be smaller than me. He went small. I went smaller.
“Through Nellie, I met Del Harris. I had all these mentors. I love being around them. There’s not much in basketball that I haven’t stolen from somebody. And Don Nelson probably is on top of the list, as is Del Harris.”
The invention of the crossover: The crossover dribble is an NBA staple these days. Everybody can do it.
But the originator of it, with apologies to Mavericks’ assistant coach God Shammgod, probably was Hardaway. On Friday, he elaborated on how the crossover was born – in the basement of his home growing up in Chicago.
“We didn’t have Nintendo or Xbox or anything like that,” he said. “We had three channels and one TV. We had an unfinished basement and sometimes it was too cold to go outside.
“I used to go down to the basement and I’d just dribble and imagine people I’m playing against that I didn’t like. And I’m going through real live action in the basement. And that’s how I learned how to dribble and how my dribbling became effective. And that’s probably where the crossover came into being.”
Asked if anybody in today’s game has the Hardaway crossover, he said:
“The Tim Hardaway crossover? Nobody. But there’s a lot of guys out there with great handles who can still break your ankles.”
Some things never change: Karl remembered the genesis of his coaching career when he took the 1984-85 Cleveland Cavaliers to the playoffs after starting the season 2-19.
“When I started 0-9 and 2-19 and, somehow, we made the playoffs and we played Boston a very respectable series,” Karl said. “And of course, Larry Bird got all the calls.
“I remember complaining about the referees after my first year playing against the Celtics and all my coaching friends (said): get in line. The Celtics always get the calls. And that’s still going on today, the Lakers and the Celtics still get all the calls.”
Nod to Dallas’ Kenyon Martin: Bob Huggins is another one of the 2022 inductees who has a connection to the Dallas area. He was coach of Kenyon Martin at Cincinnati.
Martin was a product of Bryan Adams High School.
“I’ve been very fortunate in many ways,” Huggins said. “And I haven’t been fortunate. I had the best player in the country in Kenyon Martin. We unquestionably we were going to win a national championship.
“And in the conference tournament, a guy rolled into him, broke his leg and obviously he didn’t play the rest of the year. Came back and had a great pro career. But when Ken went down, you could just see all the air go out of everything.
“To this day, it hurts that people didn’t get to see Kenyon Martin in his prime (during college) and really what he could do.”
Twitter: @ESefko
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