- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Kyrie Irving is an artist. Let him paint. If his artwork is 30 points per game on a 40-win team, so be it.
Irving already has his iconic masterpiece. Now, he wants his own masterpiece. No one can ever take away Irving’s 2016 Finals, his Game 5 tour de force of 41 points on 17-24 shooting facing elimination on the road, or his championship-winning step-back three over the two-time MVP in Game 7.
That shot will never abandon Irving and will be the first sentence of his basketball obituary. It will live forever in basketball history, maybe a little longer.
What Irving did as a Cavalier against the Warriors gives him untouchable historical equity. He is proven. His aptitude for the big stage can never be doubted, because he showed, time and time again, in barrages of unstoppable scoring, in the tensest moments, that the biggest stage was beneath him.
The moment propelled him, and when the world was loud, his mind quieted, nervousness and conscience left at the door.
Irving wants those moments to himself. It makes sense because as a basketball player he barely needs anyone else. His teammates are mostly irrelevant, hazy figures in coloured clothing standing around him. He plays the game against the man in front of him.
The only way that Irving helps his teammates is by helping them win the match. He is a black hole, but an efficient one. He makes nobody better except for the scoreboard. Would you want him as the leader of your favourite team? Maybe not. Would you want your favourite team to face him in a playoff series? Definitely not.
Irving exists in his own universe, one that not even LeBron James could penetrate. Occasionally, Irving would reap the rewards of James’s genius and otherworldly presence, running secondary actions after James had collapsed the defence, or knocking down open threes created by James’s extra-terrestrial vision. But most of the time, he just went to work, on his own time, while everyone else, including the greatest player on Earth, stood around and watched.
Irving is a selfish player, whose selfishness helps his team succeed. He is a transcendent offensive creature, the most unguardable one-on-one scorer in the league. His jumper is smooth and devastating, his handle immaculate and weaponised. He is surely the most creative finisher at the rim that the game has ever seen, someone who regularly manufactures angles out of impossibilities.
What Irving does – score efficiently in isolation – he could do in Sacramento or Denver or anywhere else in the league. Some players need LeBron James to thrive – Irving does not. If he wants to succeed in the way that most of us measure success, he might need LeBron. But conceptions of success are diverse. Irving’s current idea of success seems to involve leading his own team, crafting his own identity, and having more of those big moments which he feasts on all to himself. He will win fewer games without James, but perhaps only outside of Cleveland can he become the best realised version of himself as a basketball player.
For one of the most selfless, visionary players in NBA history, it doesn’t seem like a lot of fun playing with LeBron James. His standards are lofty, and everything is done on his terms. Irving is a piece on his chessboard.
(Image: Keith Allison/CC BY-SA 2.0)
James also might be gone in a year. The game’s best player is also its biggest control freak, and Irving’s trade demand is a strong statement that he won’t be held hostage by James like so many before him.
Irving already has his championship and the proof that he belongs. Wanting to see how far his game can go without being tied to James is a sympathetic wish. Could Irving average 30 per game and win a scoring title? Could he become a lower-tier MVP candidate? Could his playmaking skills develop in a situation where he gets to play as the true lead ball-handler?
His decision to leave Cleveland is selfish but eminently understandable. He might be sentencing himself to the fate of being a far less culturally significant Allen Iverson, but if that’s the case, so be it. Irving has earned the chance to find out if that’s all that awaits him.
If he wants to try and be a king himself, he has to leave the king behind.