Disgruntled Kyrie not the solution
No. Bad idea. Bad trade.
Given that I usually favor a team — any professional team — rolling the dice and going for the big score, I wanted to get that out of the way up front. While there were plenty of reasons for the Mavericks’ front office to be active 24 hours a day leading up to the league’s trade deadline, trading for Kyrie Irving isn’t a plan.
Hoping for someone to change after they have shown us for years exactly who they are is never a plan.
Wanted out of Cleveland, wanted out of Boston, demanded his way out of Brooklyn. This is going to go well in Dallas?
But let me say first that my favorite thing about this deal, honestly the only thing I like about the trade at all, is the club’s willingness to admit a total failure at roster building around Luka Doncic, even if owner Mark Cuban and GM Nico Harrison don’t plan to say it that way.
We were all applauding Cuban and, in this case, Donnie Nelson when the Mavs sent very discardable players and a bushel of No. 1 picks to New York for Kristaps Porzingis. We looked the other way at Porzingis’ injury history a bit, but never realized how undetermined the man was to stay on the basketball floor.
The team got cute with Jalen Brunson’s contract and lost him to New York, was fortunate to have scored Spencer Dinwiddie in the Porzingis dump and, of course, now he’s gone and so is their hardest working man on the floor, Dorian Finneysmith. The Mavs are left with two starting All-star selections and a big mess on their hands.
But the Mavs do move
on from their mistakes which is the laudable thing here, a nice contrast to the Cowboys and the sunk cost fallacy that forever plagues the Jones Boys in running that team.
They’re paying a fortune (in running back terms) to Ezekiel Elliott so Stephen says he sees no drop-off despite the obvious. It was even worse 5-6 years ago when Jerry stated that because the club had sunk so much time and money into developing Jason Garrett into a head coach, they had to stick with him as long as possible. Those 9 years brought two playoff wins.
The Mavs, to their credit, blow things up and try again. There’s just not much to love about this explosion. If anything, it speeds up the schedule on when the real blowup (Luka leaving) is coming.
I get that the notion of featuring a backcourt that averages 60 points per game is exciting. And surely there will be nights where things are clicking and an opposing coach declares Luka and Kyrie unguardable.
Nights. But how many?
And how will that ball-sharing go for the Mavericks’ superstar leading the NBA in scoring? Irving is not and has never been a standaround, wait-for-the-ball shooting guard. Beyond the fact it’s not his nature, his 3-point shooting this season with Brooklyn is much lower than Dinwiddie’s percentage and Irving’s worst in seven years.
Taking turns with the ball can work to a certain extent but we’ve got a decade’s worth of Irving becoming unhappy over the least perceived slights. He wanted out of Cleveland one year after winning a championship with Lebron James, he was never happy in Boston and made it clear he owed his teammates nothing, then worked his way to Brooklyn where he announced the club didn’t really need Steve Nash as a coach before going on to miss nearly half the Nets’ games over 3 seasons for a myriad of reasons.
Irving posted a thank you to Nets’ fans for letting him “live out my dream I had as a kid with y’all. It will always be Love from me and my
family.’’
This, of course, came after he threatened to sit out the rest of the season if the Nets didn’t meet his trade demand.
Irving will be hailed as a hero to those who think anyone who speaks his mind (regardless of how offensive) is courageous. I don’t think there’s any need to rehash all of that — it will happen, anyway — but it’s the basketball failings, mostly his complete lack of availability and dependability, that force me to dislike the trade.
Doncic piles up technical fouls, yes, but he agonizes over the fact that it could eventually cost him a game. A single game? Irving misses that in his sleep.
There seems to be a complete lack of recognition on management’s part that defense — the lack of it — is Dallas’ problem in 2023 and the glaring difference between a barely .500 team and last year’s Western Conference finalists. How, pray tell, does Kyrie Irving and his indifferent approach at that end of the floor fix any of that?
Finally, I think we need to disabuse the notion that winning an NBA title is based on having two superstars on a team. It’s great if you’ve got Michael and Scottie or Shaq and Kobe. But the only Mavs’ banner recognizes a team from more than a decade ago that had one Western Conference all-star that season. Plenty of good, ready-to-win-a-title players, some of whom had inhabited that star level like Jason Kidd and Shawn Marion but only one true shining star.
Now Kidd gets to invent an offense on the run that keeps Doncic and Irving happy while figuring out who can defend on this squad. Two supremely talented players in one backcourt will make for an electrifying show at times. Just don’t expect a positive result this spring.
And when Irving decides it’s time to move on (as he did in Cleveland, Boston and Brooklyn) or, much worse, Luka decides he wants out of the Kyrie circus, don’t pretend to be surprised.