8 players from the 2022 NBA Draft class who will outperform their selection

3. Picked 37th in the 2022 NBA Draft: Jaden Hardy

This wasn’t how the draft order was supposed to fall for Jaden Hardy. One of the top players of his recruiting class, Hardy bet on himself and bypassed college ball in favor of the NBA’s G League Ignite. For most high-profile young talents, this has been a resounding success with many of the top players on the team landing in the NBA Draft lottery. For Hardy, however, the challenges of playing against professional-level competition hurt his standing.

Despite showing flashes of the shot-creating excellent and deep shooting that made him so revered, Hardy was horribly inefficient during the G League Ignite tour. He made just 39.7% of his shots including 33.6% of eight and a half 3-point attempts per night in that 13-game sample. To make matters worse, he averaged only 0.7 more assists than turnovers.

To make matters more difficult, Hardy shared some of the same struggles in his Summer League performance with horrible shooting splits and way too many careless turnovers. Instead of being the star of the show, Hardy should experience the harsh reality of being a second-round rookie in his first season in the NBA. That experience, along with the daily grind and towering workload of a player at this stage, should help him adjust to the team around him.

It hasn’t been pretty up to this point, but it’s an easy bet that Hardy will improve over time. His raw talent is far greater than where he was selected in the 2022 NBA Draft.