At least Irving woke our interest
He came across as rude. And arrogant.
And thunderously, ear-shatteringly, mind-numbingly full of himself.
But the word that goes best with Kyrie Irving’s appearance the other day on ESPN’s
“First Take” is
“I have a presence and aura about me that’s very reality- based,” Irving told hosts Stephen A. Smith, Molly Qerim and (via remote) Max Kellerman.
As for the distractions arising from his fallout with LeBron James and his asked-for liberation from the Cleveland Cavaliers via a trade to Boston, Irving said, “Oh, if you’re very much woke, there’s no such thing as distractions, especially all this.”
And: “I have nothing but love for Cleveland,” said the man who is very, very happy to be out of Cleveland.
Remember that scene at the end of “Men in Black,” when Will Smith identifies Dennis Rodman as an alien from the planet Solaxian 9?
I was thinking the same thing yesterday about Kyrie Irving — that he’s not from this (flat) earth.
But here’s where I’ll drive this column right off the road and into a ditch by posing a question: Is it really such a bad thing that Irving uses strange words? We needed a Roger ClemensEnglish/EnglishRoger Clemens Dictionary to understand what the Rocket was saying during his 13 years in Boston, but it didn’t stop him from winning 192 games for the Red Sox, tying him with Cy Young for the most in the history of the franchise.
And is anybody around here in any way upset that Irving is essentially setting himself up for a WWE-style Steel Cage Match with LeBron when the Celtics and Cavs conveniently open the NBA season on Oct. 17 at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena?
(In case you’re wondering, there’s virtually no chance the Red Sox and Indians would be playing an American League Championship Series game that night in Cleveland. The Indians are almost assured of having a better regular-season record than the Sox, and Oct. 17 falls during the three middle games of the ALCS, and, well, so on …)
Back to Kyrie Irving.
If it turns out the guy is a big league pill once he pulls on his nice, new Celtics jersey, we’ll deal with that when it happens. If he goes all David Price on the Celtics beat writers, that’ll be addressed. He’s essentially replacing the very, very popular Isaiah Thomas, and, fair or not, the personalities and smiles of the two players are going to be compared, dissected and analyzed all season.
But if Irving has a cat fight going with LeBron James that’s going to play out on this year’s NBA stage, beginning with the fullblown TNT treatment on Opening Night, that’s, what, a bad thing? Have we all lost our minds? It’s true that Kyrie Irving is now a card-carrying villain back in Cleveland. The headline in columnist Bill Livingston’s column in yesterday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer said it all: “A smug Kyrie Irving doesn’t care that he never notified LeBron James of trade demand.”
I take that back: The headline actually did say it all, considering that Livingston wrote, “A smirking KyMe said he didn’t tip James off to his trade demand because of his insufficiency of spotlight command, saw no reason why he should have, and, basically, didn’t give a damn how James felt about it.”
So there.
The problem with last year’s NBA season is that, deep down, every Celtics fan knew things were going to play out exactly as they played out. The Celtics were going to lose to the Cavs in the playoffs. And if any Celtics fans developed some temporary amnesia about this sobering inevitability, the smelling salts arrived on the night of April 5 when the Cavs left the bus running out on Causeway Street while rolling to a 114-91 victory against the Celts. LeBron ho-hummed his way to 36 points that night.
And now? Well, now we aren’t so sure. Maybe IT and Jae Crowder make the Cavs better. Maybe not. Maybe Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward make the Celtics better. Maybe not.
Irving’s head-scratching interview on “First Take” has inspired my own first take on the upcoming NBA season: Celtics-Cavs is a whole lot more interesting than it was last year.
You should be very much woke to this by now.