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The Dallas Mavericks have a problem. They’ve got a star player in Luka Dončić, a generational talent who can manage, score, pass, boards OK, has a weird back three-point shot, good size, the exact kind of guy you want on your team. Besides Luka, they pack a bunch of role players. Last year, the Mavs won 52 games, defeated an openly suppressed Suns team in the second round and lost to the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals. Luka, apparently, had succeeded. He was a shitty boy from the Balkans and the world was his oyster.
Then this season started. The Mavs expected to build momentum from that Conference Finals appearance through 2023. Instead, the Mavs have been disappointing, inconsistent, just “good.”
No one in the NBA, especially young supernova talent, wants to be “good.” Mark Cuban’s Mavs, driven by both their cravings and the impending free agency of Doncic in 2027, would like to get better, faster. The main way to do this is to replace some of these actors with basketball wizards, the kind of guys who can do magic while Luka is resting, or having a night off, or when the other team spends a night.
These players are not easy to find. They’re called stars because they’re far away, visible to the naked eye on game night, but out of reach of your dirty, greedy little fingers. But if your ceiling is low and the time is approaching, you do what you have to do. Even if it’s more than a little risky.
Acquiring the services of Kyrie Irving does not put you at risk of injury. His contract expires this summer, the exact financial asset you want if you’re looking to have some leeway to sign someone else down the line. His playing isn’t mysterious, inconsistent, or flawed in any particular way. You might complain about his defense, but the little guards don’t make much of their hay in that area anyway. On the court, he is now more or less what he always was: a fabulous ball handler, a good shooter and a brilliant finisher at the rim – a perfect second engine for a team that burns out every time the first can not. quite up the hill.
But he was available at the bargain price of some decent roleplayers, a 2029 first-round pick and two second-round picks for a reason. Because he is a fucking pain in the ass. It’s not new. It hasn’t always been a bad thing, but it’s the only consistent truth of Kyrie’s entire career and there’s no reason to believe he won’t rear his ugly head and waste his time. on the Mavs like he has in most other places. The Mavs even know it. They just hope they can get Kyrie to bring the great production he had with the Brooklyn Nets before he does some completely unacceptable bullshit that will require a wild arrangement where he has to play with a pirate eye patch or something like that.
A brief index of Kyrie’s work, if you’re unfamiliar: A lean season after winning the 2016 NBA championship, Kyrie decided that LeBron James, the best NBA player of his generation, was restricting his style and would prefer to reign. like a prince on greener pastures. News reports/gossip at the time suggested that Kyrie would go several days without speaking to her teammates. Shortly after asking for a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Boston Celtics, he called LeBron and apologized for how everything went, saying he understood the burden of leadership. He made the call after publicly airing his young teammates after a bad loss to an extremely poor Orlando Magic team.
LeBron James and Kyrie Irving as Cleveland Cavaliers teammates in 2016.
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At that time, he told reporters that he thought the Earth was flat. He backed down later. Kind of. Looking back, it seems like he might have believed the Earth was actually flat, as Kyrie is “susceptible to misinformation.”
Time passes. Kyrie tells people he wants to be a Boston Celtic for life, then he almost immediately quits the team in free agency and signs with the Brooklyn Nets. Now this is the part where I write about the GOOD things Kyrie did because of her natural inclination to be annoying. Personally, driving Celtics fans crazy and making them en masse claim that Kemba Walker was a suitable replacement for Kyrie: very funny!
He led the fight to get the NBA to stand up for the Black Lives Matter movement during the COVID-19 ‘bubble’ season, then tried to get players to go on an honest-to-God wildcat strike afterward. the police. murder of Jacob Blake. Former President Obama, bored at home and thirsty for NBA action, had to personally intervene to get the bubble back on track.
A stopped clock is just twice a day, as they say. In Brooklyn, he started to really lose the plot. The first year went well, even though he rolled his ankle in the playoffs. During the second year, however, he refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, for reasons which remain rather nebulous. As rolling stone reported at the time, “Irving, who serves as Vice Chairman of the Players Union Executive Committee, recently began following and liking Instagram posts by a conspiracy theorist who claims ‘secret societies’ are planting vaccines in a plot to connect Black people to a master computer for “a plan of Satan”.
Since the Nets play in New York, where you had to be vaccinated to work in a gigantic basketball arena full of people, he was in and out of the lineup all year, the Nets kinda stank as a result, and they lost to – guess who – the Boston Celtics in the first round.
When Chris Brown and Ted Cruz team up to say you’re doing the right thing, it’s time to step back and ask yourself, Hey, maybe I’m not living my life right?
Then it got really weird. Around Kanye Hitlergate 2022, Kyrie shared the Amazon listing for a three-hour documentary titled Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America it’s really, really anti-Semitic.
It started a long media cycle where reporters asked Kyrie if he was anti-Semitic, and he smiled and said any accusations that he was anti-Semitic were “unwarranted” without disavowing the content of the hate video. that he shared that promoted Holocaust denial. and accused Jews of being satanists controlling the media. Instead of apologizing, he was defiant. “History is not supposed to be hidden from anyone,” Irving told the media, adding, “I’m not going to give up anything that I believe in. I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.
This led Nike to drop Irving as a spokesperson, even though his iconic shoes were widely worn in the NBA and generated staggering revenue for the company. Kevin Durant, his Brooklyn Nets teammate, close friend and one of the best players in the NBA, has supported him through it all.
This whole mess made everyone not named KD wonder out loud: What the fuck is going on here? Does Kyrie WANT to play basketball? Is he just trying to annoy as many people as possible? And then the season started, he put on the uniform and he was good at basketball, so everyone raised their hands and admitted that we couldn’t know anything about this guy. (He eventually apologised.)
When he asked for a contract extension, the Nets said: no, absolutely not, you know what a pain in the ass you areand he said trade meand they said Of course, whatever, anything to never speak to you again. And now KD and the Nets have to pick up the pieces.
Here is the story of another NBA player:
In March 2021, Meyers Leonard was broadcasting Call of Duty on Twitch. After being killed in a particularly cruel way, he called the guy he tagged a particularly nasty anti-Semitic slur, real toxic online gambling stuff. Meyers was then let go by the Miami Heat.
From there, Meyers presented a comprehensive attempt to prove that he was not a virulent anti-Semite. He went to Jewish community centers, lectured at his alma mater, had a child, tried to stay in shape and huddled by the phone, hoping a team would reach out. They didn’t – until very recently, when a depleted Lakers team invited him to practice.
People have different levels of tolerance when it comes to repentance. I am personally inclined to say that Meyers Leonard did what he was supposed to do and should be allowed to play professional basketball again for money. But there is a problem: Meyers is not very good. He’s tall, athletic, not prone to injury, and kind of a decent shooter, but he just doesn’t have the otherworldly spatial thinking skills you need to be a highly functional NBA player. He doesn’t bring enough to the table to balance the crap your social media person would have to take if you signed him, so he just lingers outside the stadium, posting his baby on IG and playing a different game, better, less hate-filled shooter, hopefully.
The difference between Kyrie and Meyers isn’t ethical, it’s material. Professional sports are in the realm of human production, and they’ll do the math and look at some weird bullshit if you’re good at it. Kyrie is one of the best so he becomes a huge pain in the ass over and over again until there isn’t even the slightest possibility that he can achieve that level of transcendence on the pitch . It probably won’t work for the Mavericks. Kyrie just can’t help but intervene, alienating her teammates, making her employers tear their hair out. But the Mavs needed juice, so they rolled the dice. As before, so forever.
