C’S STAR FINALLY ABLE TO JUST ‘HOOP AND BE GREAT’

Will there be an even better version of Irving someday?

Kidd-Gilchrist shrugged before saying, “I don’t know. I’m not going to judge. But off the court, yeah — he’s older, he’s wiser. He’s mature now.”

Irving has talked of developing and having to overcome “bad habits” during his early years in Cleveland.

In a recent chat with the Herald, Irving went back through growing up in an NBA environment that, prior to the return of LeBron James, was unstable on every level.

“There’s an entertainment aspect of NBA basketball that I didn’t know I was signing up for,” he said. “You give up a sense of your privacy, a sense of what you were able to do prior to being a professional. The game was going to be the game and I was going to figure that out. There were a lot of changes that I had to adjust to — different GMs, different coaches, which happens over the course of an NBA career.”

Most young stars, though, don’t experience the same managerial turnover witnessed in Cleveland by Irving, who played for four coaches in his six seasons with the Cavaliers.

Starting with his debut as the 2012 Rookie of the Year, Irving enjoyed tremendous freedom with the ball, for better and worse.

Thus, those bad habits. “At first I was pretty stubborn, because I wanted to figure it out on my own,” Irving said. “When you follow the lineage of great players that have come before you, they’ve reached out to other great players and asked for help. It’s just figuring it out — how to get out of the young man’s mindset of being in this game of basketball and trying to perfect it on your own, and all at once. Attitude, there’s so many bad habits you have to break out of, especially when you’re in a losing situation at times. It forces you to act a certain way. You have to get rid of those habits. In order to be in a winning environment you have to have a winning attitude. I know that sounds cliché, but that’s true.

“You start figuring it out that there’s so much more to the game. You’re afforded opportunities to meet great players, which I took full advantage of. When you get to this level and you realize there’s a different motivation, and different approach that people have, whether coaches or players, to adjust to, and I just wanted to hoop and be great.”