It’s all but impossible to imagine another actor as Nick, the curmudgeonly and unambitious but also loyal and lovable character Jake Johnson inhabited on “New Girl,” the sitcom that ran on Fox for most of the 2010s.

Johnson is also preposterously perfect as Dusty Boyd — a once-promising tennis player who, when he really needs a win, turns to the burgeoning sport of pickleball — in the silly but enjoyable sports comedy “The Dink.”

A straight-to-streaming movie debuting this week on Apple TV, “The Dink” is helmed by Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”), working from a screenplay by one of producer Johnson’s buddies, Sean Clements (the “Hollywood Handbook” podcast), the director and writer both being regular pickleball players. That love of the increasingly popular sport — which blends elements of table tennis, tennis and badminton and is played on a badminton-sized court — permeates the largely laugh-filled affair.

Pickleballers, “The Dink” is not here to mock you. At least … not mainly.

When we are introduced to Dusty, he talks about some of the greats in sports — Tom Brady, LeBron James and Joey Chestnut — and how he was poised to join them.

“My dad wasn’t like other dads,” Dusty says. “He didn’t teach me how to read — he taught me how to hit.

“And it worked.”

It worked so well that Dusty adopted the nickname “The Hammer.”

Well, “The Hammer” fell — hard — to future great Andy Roddick, who portrays himself in the movie, and injured his wrist in the process, seemingly sideswiping all of this promise.

Now, he works at the tennis club owned by his father, Chuck Boyd (Ed Harris, “Top Gun: Maverick”), teaching the sport to 9-year-olds who are highly uninterested in his personal narrative. Fortunately, he is worshipped by his sidekick and fellow employee, PJ (Aaron Chen), and gladly accepts all of his adoration.

On this day, he gets into it with Candace (Mary Steenburgen), one of the members who uses the club’s lone pickleball court, and bans her from the place.

This behavior displeases Dad, even though he loathes pickleball and is scheming to stop a movement spearheaded by another member, Skip (Patton Oswalt, “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”) — whom Chuck not-so-affectionately calls “Piggy” — to see more space devoted to the sport than the one poorly maintained court.

“An epidemic is sweeping across our once great nation,” Chuck tells some gathered allies, “and its name is (pauses dramatically) ‘pickleball’ — the novel coronavirus of sports.”

Dusty is right there with him. However, when he reinjures his wrist, a doctor portrayed by Ben Stiller — another of the movie’s producers and the star of 2004’s “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story,” a spiritually similar sports comedy — recommends he play pickleball to aid in his recovery.

He reluctantly shows up at some nearby courts and, of course, quickly finds himself paired up with the much older but similarly competitive Candace.

As she works to make him understand he shouldn’t try to hit the Wiffle ball-like sphere as hard as he can, the two begin to bond.

The doubles partners are two singles — Candace is divorced from Mitch (Martin Kove, “Cobra Kai”), and Dusty has split from girlfriend Marisa (an underused Chloe Fineman, who recently announced she’s leaving “Saturday Night Live”) — and you quickly wonder whether these two are going to become a pair off the court. (“The Dink” leans into this idea by having Dusty invite himself over to Candace’s after she tells him she’s going to watch “The Graduate” that evening.)

When Chuck employs an old club bylaw to require an on-court duel for Piggy, er, Skip, to get his second pickleball court, AND when the former passes over Dusty to play for his side in favor of club member Neil (Chris Parnell, “Archer”), you can see the general direction “The Dink” is heading.

The movie is named for a real pickleball shot, a soft hit designed to plop the ball into the other side’s “kitchen,” the non-volley zone closer to the net. It represents the opposite of what Dusty’s been about since he was that hard-hitting tennis phenom, so you know he’ll have to embrace it before the closing credits roll.

The storytelling that takes us to that point isn’t spectacular, but it is serviceable, with Johnson’s ridiculousness-meets-earnestness performance doing a lot of the heavy lifting. He pulls off a brand of offbeat that stops short, at least for the most part, of being over-the-top. His deliveries of some of Dusty’s lines as he watches “The Graduate” for the first time may be reason enough to click on “The Dink.”

Plus, Johnson — who plays a supporting role on the entertaining Apple comedy-drama series “Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed,” which just wrapped its debut season — enjoys an easy chemistry with the always-pleasant Steenburgen (“Book Club”), who helps ground the affair with her steady work.

Along with Roddick, we get another former tennis great, John McEnroe, playing a version of himself that blends his TV analyst work with his wonderful efforts as the narrator on the Netflix comedy series “Never Have I Ever.”

It’s one of the many little joys in “The Dink” that help it add up to a winner.

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‘THE DINK’

3 stars ( out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong language, and sexual material)

Running time: 1:42

How to watch: On Apple TV July 24

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