NBA PLAYOFFS : Little Warrior’s Big Words : Lakers: Hardaway, contained by Magic in Game 3, promises a different story in Game 4 today.

It’s springtime, when NBA reputations begin to flower.

Ask the Lakers, they have a beanstalk on their hands.

He’s Warrior point guard Tim Hardaway, now matched against the one and only Magic Johnson who eyes the youngster admiringly, the master moving over--slightly--for a prodigy.

Unfortunately for Johnson, he gets to see Hardaway belly-button to belly-button. In Game 3 Mike Dunleavy gave his 6-9 guard a blindfold and cigarette and told him to guard the 6-0 (allegedly) Hardaway.

Hardaway settled for a mere 24 points and shot 43%, down from his series averages of 30.5 and 56%.

Guess the maestro showed the impetuous youth a thing or two, right?

“They got away with it,” said Hardaway as the teams prepared for today’s Game 4.

“They know they got away with it. Next game, I think it’ll be a different story.”

That’s how long it takes to learn the first truth about Hardaway. Bashful, he’s not.

He says he’s 6-0, looks 5-10 or 5-11, has a cherub’s guileless face with only the hint of a dead-end kid’s sneer and a weightlifter’s body. He comes from Chicago’s inner city, where he watched his father play ball that resembled rumbles with a basketball thrown in.

Hardaway says his dad taught him “some elbows are accidental, some are for you,” and instructed him not to back down.

Besides valuable instruction, Hardaway expected to get one thing from his father, who was 6-6: height. However, Tim topped out at whatever he is, limiting his choice of campuses to faraway Texas El Paso.

People, he says stone-faced, were writing him off “way back.”

“In high school, they said I was too short to play, I couldn’t shoot a jump shot. In college they said the same thing. I was too small to make it, I wouldn’t go to classes, I wasn’t going to do this, I wasn’t going to do that.

“I could shoot in college. I just improved a little bit. I like to prove people wrong about my shot. A lot of people say, I can’t shoot, I shoot a knuckleball.”

They definitely said that.

Not long ago, the consensus was that a free throw challenged Hardaway’s range.

Mike Dunleavy, then a Milwaukee assistant, worked him out two years ago and recommended him to Don Nelson with one reservation.

“I thought he was the best guard available,” Dunleavy says. “He made great decisions with the ball, he was a great ballhandler. I told Nelly, ‘The only bad news, he’s only got about 16-foot, 17-foot range.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

It’s not unusual for a young pro’s shooting to improve, but rarely as quickly as Hardaway’s.

This season, he shot 38% on three-pointers, 10th best in the NBA, knuckler and all.

“I just know it goes through the net,” Dunleavy says. “It makes the net spin, I know that.”

Defiant in a quiet way, Hardaway doesn’t campaign for his place in the top echelon of guards but he’s there. In October, a Laker official said he thought Hardaway was already a peer to Kevin Johnson and that was before Hardaway had a sensational season and KJ only a fair one.

“Nobody is up with Magic,” Nelson says. “I would think Tim fits in the next tier, with (John) Stockton, (Mark) Price, KJ.

“What does he need to improve? Nothing. Just mature a little. He’s as perfect as you can get for a second-year player.”

Nelson, who only started one rookie--Marques Johnson--in his 10-year Milwaukee reign and is known to be a stern taskmaster, fell head over heels in love with Hardaway. So profuse was he in his praise, a rival general manager thought Nelson was setting everyone up, that he really planned to trade Hardaway and make Sarunas Marciulionis the starter.

Not this time.

“I’ve never had a great point guard before,” Nelson said this season, redoubling his enthusiasm, “and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what I was missing. I’ll never be without a terrific point guard again.”

If the playoffs are supposed to tell the story, they’re telling.

In his first playoff series, Hardaway was too much for San Antonio’s Rod Strickland and helpers.

“They put David Wingate on him,” Nelson says. “They were trying to muscle him. They were talking to him--and he’ll talk back if somebody talks to him.

“He’d say, ‘Here it comes. Can’t stop it.’ And as the ball went in the basket, ‘Oh yeah.’ That’s our slogan: ‘Here it comes. Can’t stop it. Oh yeah.’ ”

The Lakers would just like to slow it down for a few days, or the rest of the decade.

Laker Notes

Sam Perkins bruised his left leg on the final rebound scramble across the floor Friday but is expected to play today. . . . Don Nelson on Byron Scott: “He’s on a roll, make no mistakes about that. He had been all playoffs long. We knew that going in. He’s the Laker who has been hottest in the playoffs and they need it.” . . . Scott is averaging 16.7 points, shooting 53%, and has made nine of 16 three-pointers.

MISMATCH: The Boston Celtics have little problem with the Detroit Pistons, 115-83, in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series. C5