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Irving Would Be Another Gamble for the Knicks Who Cannot Quit Rolling the Dice
The Knicks have a troubled history trading for point guards, and despite the innate difference in superstar Irving, a trade for Kyrie would be polarizing and maddening.

Kyrie Irving’s interest in New York has me divided. Clearly, Irving is a world-class talent, a maestro with the ball and a overwhelmingly deadly isolation game–and an All-Star point guard that wants to play in the Big Apple. It’s actually not an uncommon theme for Knicks fans, especially during the Isiah Thomas era.
Do you remember how the tenures of Stephon Marbury, Steve Francis, and Penny Hardaway went?
Okay, so maybe those are poor analogies to the budding, not-even-in-his-prime talent of Irving. While Kyrie is only 25 years young, there are characteristic flaws in his game, and abundant issues with his health keeping him on the hardwood.
I’ll admit, the prospect of having Irving light up the Garden makes me grin; however, it’s troublesome that we, and reportedly the Knicks, are ready to once again throw away our future first round pick, or picks, due to the tantalizing Good Player Wants to Come to New York. And again, it’s difficult for me to chastise Irving–who’s really, really talented!–when the Knicks have failed to properly rebuild since their last Finals berth in 1999.
So instead, I’ll present to you my inner monologue. I’m quite divided on this issue. I don’t necessarily want to call trading for Irving in exchange for multiple picks “mortgaging our future,” but I fail to land on a proper term that appeases both the ecstatic Kyrie could play here crowd and the let’s not go down this path crowd. It’s not a clear picture, more like a Picasso artwork circa Cubism period. Here are some conflicting ideas floating in my head trying to grapple with the question of acquiring Kyrie Irving:

High Value, High Expectations
Let’s get this out of the way: the Knicks minus Carmelo Anthony, plus Irving (most likely the outcome of this summer if a trade comes to fruition) would further cement the Knicks as a middling team. Irving, as great of an offensive talent as he may be, will not take the ‘Bockers to the Holy Land–in this case, at least the eighth seed–in 2018. You can argue Porzingis will accelerate his development, Hernangómez will be more adept in the NBA, and even Hardaway, Jr.’s, homecoming can be a positive for New York. Nonetheless, all those components, and possibly more, does not make the Knicks an attractive contender. They may as well contend for the bottom-to-middle of the weakened Eastern Conference playoff field, but the Knicks will not be a superteam again, so much like Derrick Rose declared one year ago.
And then there’s part of me that says that’s okay! Nobody expects to contend with such a young core, and the priority can still be to develop these young players with the addition of the 25-year-old champion Irving.
But then reality hits me again. Leveraging New York’s future, for example shipping out one, or probably two first round picks, is a bad idea in pretty much any trade fabrication. Here are my thoughts on first round picks, no matter what number they fall on, lottery be damned. In the abstract, a first rounder is polarizing; he’s either a future All-Star or unappetizing fringe NBA-er that’s not worth tracking Tankathon for six months seeing if moving into the top 5 of the lottery drawing will change your franchise.
What many people may not be thinking with a first round pick is the simple value of an average roster spot bound to a rookie scale contract. My friend and colleague Jeffrey Bellone statistically hammers home the point that players outside the top 5 only have a 50 percent change to be of NBA starter quality in their careers. That’s kinda bad! However, one point I’ll fire back to Jeff and others is this: maybe not being a starter isn’t that bad, and maybe being a role player and young is important in attaching yourself around high quality young players, such as Kristaps and Willy, and I’ll even throw in Timmy.
The optimizing and meshing of young players with each other is an important laboratory experiment when creating your team’s identity and building chemistry, no pun intended. I’ll give the example of the Golden State Warriors circa 2012. The Dubs didn’t exactly know what they had after drafting Curry, Thompson, Green, and Barnes. Sure, Curry and Thompson’s exploits from long-range may have been acknowledged by the coaching staff, but it wasn’t until unlocking Draymond Green’s potential (thanks to verbally contracted Knicks head coach Steve Kerr) and the savvy additions of Shaun Livingston, Andre Iguodala, and Marreese Speights that pushed Oakland into the right direction. My point is that rebuilds take years and forming a core even with periphery players is crucial to constructing a roster not only 1–3, but 7–10 on the depth chart.
That long-winded, and maybe imperfect, example was made to say trading for Irving while losing multiple picks hurts the Knicks in terms of building a identifiable roster. And also the combined VORP of the future picks could sum greater than the singular Irving, but that’s a total mystery.
If Irving comes to New York, in exchange for Anthony and picks, then the Knicks are missing out on grooming their team properly for the impossibly high ceiling that Kyrie brings, and also stay a middle tier ball club in the short-term.

Irving’s Health
Kyrie Irving won the Rookie of the Year award in 2012 despite playing in only 51 games of the shortened NBA season. Patrick Ewing is the only Rookie of the Year winner to player in fewer games, one less than Irving.
That’s not a compelling argument, though, since Irving played in every possible game in that shorter season.
Kyrie missed the first 23 games of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2015–16 season due to his broken kneecap suffered during the prior season’s playoff run. Irving’s fragility is a hot topic among NBA fans considering the young, yet accoladed point guard has dealt with several injury bouts during his career. Kyrie played in 381 out of 461 possible games. That’s not a great mark for a player still in the prime of his career.
My strong counterpoint to this, however, is Kyrie has played and started in every possible playoff game the Cavs have been a part of these last three years. But, that kneecap injury suffered during Game 1 of the 2015 NBA Finals sidelined Kyrie for the remainder of that final round plus the first 23 games of the next season. But, that sort of injury is really impossible to predict. Maybe that’s the definition of injury prone, then.
See, it’s not an easily disambiguated situation. And Kyrie has player flaws that bug me, too.

Under LeBron’s Cloak, Irving Could Only Appear As Great
This will sound much worse than it means, but when you’re on LeBron James’ team, you will look much better than you really are. Hopefully that’s not too much of a diss towards Kyrie because he was a wonderful player in the Cleveland Before Lebron (B.L.) period. However, while playing with King James, Irving’s deficiencies were mostly diffused, save for some moments in last June’s Finals that crowned the Warriors once more.
My issue in Irving’s game is the ball-stopping nature. That’s also kinda contradictory as a Knicks fan who rooted for Carmelo Anthony.

The other side of me disagrees, though, because one statistic that stands out is Kyrie’s assist percentage was a healthy 31 percent and up in the B.L. Under the influence and ball handling of James, Kyrie’s assist percentage declined by roughly five points, and though I cannot claim a clear causality, I will defend the correlation of LeBron’s return to Cleveland with these figures.
Kyrie is a star on offense, and mostly with the ball in his hands, he’ll make insane plays. He’ll calculate the defenders’ motives and decide whether to test their lateral agility and head to the rack, or look for a sweet mid-range spot from which to pull up and swish.
On defense, Irving is a liability (a career worst 112 Defensive Rating per 100 possessions in 2016–17), and if he becomes backcourt partners with Hardaway, then the Knicks will face a barrage of opposing guards finding their way close to the hoop and likely increasing the fouls committed by the Knicks’ frontcourt, namely Porzingis. Defense is a complicated game that requires communication between every teammate, but Irving lacks the ability to solidly defend his position, something the Knicks hoped to fix when they drafted Frank Ntilikina last month.
Trading for Kyrie Irving is a gamble. You’re gambling that the value added to the team from Kyrie will be greater than both future first rounders. This is a concept repeated by previous New York front office regimes.
Irving is a fantastic player who would bring excitement and energy to the Knicks and fire up the MSG crowd. However, what divides me is losing other young players to the Knicks’ potential young core to give Irving, a great, yet flawed player, the chance to finally lead a team on his own sans LeBron.
Ultimately, my mind tells me to not go star-chasing again for a point guard, despite the major differences between Irving and older incarnations of New York’s guard dreams in Marbury, et al. I would say give the proper build a fair shake before dismissing it entirely for the chance to lose to an Eastern Conference foe, and also the Warriors looming once again. Instead, acquiring lottery picks to develop together should be the best route.
— Reid Goldsmith, managing editor

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