Kyrie Irving could be the cure to our regular season woes
Kyrie Irving is fed up with singing harmonies, and he’s ready to drop a solo single that will totally change his image. It might be sad to see him leave, but this song could be just enough of a banger to make it all worthwhile.
A year ago at this time, we were all bemoaning the fact that Kevin Durant’s decision to join the Warriors had just made the regular season perfunctory. The Finals are all but guaranteed to be a Cavs-Warriors three-peat, so why bother paying attention until June, right? We called the Finals correctly, sure. But we were very, very wrong about the rest. What we saw last year was one of the most entertaining regular seasons in recent memory, with offensive explosions, a neck-and-neck-and-neck MVP race, improbable winning streaks and more. With every slate of games, there was a genuine feeling that you could see something never before seen, whether it was Russell Westbrook going for his third 50-point triple-double, James Harden racking up 20 assists or Nikola Jokic managing to pull a basketball out of a defender’s ear before flicking it behind his head to a cutting Gary Harris.
We saw an NBA-record 10 different players score 50 point games throughout last season. 10 different players! Surely, a great number of factors influenced that outcome, but the biggest was how many teams placed an inordinate scoring burden on only one player’s shoulders. Last season, 24 players (with a minimum of 40 games played) recorded a usage rate of at least 28 percent last year, the second-highest amount this century.
This jives with one of the biggest narratives of the last 12 months: the stranded superstar. These are the transcendent talents who, lacking the sufficient assistance to win 60 games, has to roll up his sleeves and take on his opponent all by themselves. I’m talking about Paul George, DeMarcus Cousins, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Anthony Davis and even Jimmy Butler. It makes sense that in the year of the stranded superstar, we would have more jaw dropping individual showings than ever before. It was exhilarating, but it was also fleeting.
AD and Boogie got together. So did PG and Russ. James Harden has Chris Paul, and Jimmy Butler is up north with Karl-Anthony Towns. Even Isaiah Thomas has Gordon Hayward to help with the scoring load. Our stranded superstars from last year all have some pretty talented life rafts, and while that’s great news for them, it also means we probably aren’t going to see as many jaw dropping offensive performances next year.
Enter Kyrie Irving.
Irving’s request to be traded away has been reported and analyzed to death over the last couple of weeks, partially because he’s a star and any request to leave LeBron James is unusual, and partially because it’s August and we have nothing else to talk about. Regardless, I’m not coming up with any fake trades, and I’m not talking about the Cavs soap opera. I just want to talk about one thing: How freaking awesome the 2017–2018 Kyrie Irving solo tour would be.
We’ll certainly have great storylines to follow next season, but I bet they’ll be much more team-driven than last year. Can the Rockets find a way to mesh their new personnel into the formula that worked so well last year? Can the 76ers stay healthy enough to really see what they have? Will Timberwolves fans try to incept the idea of a stretch four into Tom Thibodeau’s head? Things like that.
Player-driven narratives, like the Russell Westbrook storyline that dominated NBA coverage last year, could be seriously subdued thanks to all the star clumping that took place. We won’t see Russ testing the limits of human exertion quite so much every night, but Kyrie could be just the replacement we need.
NBA players want different things. No surprise there — at the end of the day, it’s a job like any other. From the reports we’ve seen, what Kyrie Irving wants is to find out how far he can take his game and if he can succeed as a true number one option. It’s either that, or things in Cleveland are (somehow) even worse than they seem, and he wants out before he’s tainted even further. Regardless, both Zach Lowe and Brian Windhorst would reportedly be shocked if he’s in a Cavs uniform come opening night.
The Cavs losing Kyrie would obviously cause huge ripple effects across the entire league, but that’s small potatoes. Most importantly, we, the captive audience of the NBA, would be gaining an unleashed scoring machine, determined to spread his wings so far that they block all his teammates from view so he doesn’t have to pass to them.
Kyrie is our new Westbrook, our new barometer for the ceiling of individual offensive performance. We may not get another Game 7 shot over Steph Curry, but we’ll have the random stretch in January when he drops 40 in three straight games. We might lose the playoff matchup against Isaiah Thomas or John Wall, but we gain the Tuesday night matchup that would be an open and shut case until he starts pulling up from 28 feet just to see how it feels. Kyrie is our regular season savior, a one-man League Pass darling.
Let’s get him on the Knicks and make Madison Square Garden rock so hard that families in Hackensack think there’s an earthquake. Let’s get him on the Heat so he and Dion Waiters can dwarf LeBron’s petty game by mid-December. Let’s get him on the Suns so he and Devin Booker can be the most entertaining backcourt in the league (bonus: we can watch opposing backcourts have career nights against them as well).
This is Kyrie Irving’s destiny. He’s already got an unforgettable championship moment under his belt, along with three whole seasons being a contender next to LeBron. In terms of success, Irving has already done better than most, and he’s barely in his prime. It’s time for a new challenge. It’s time for “Kyrie Irving, championship sidekick” to fade away and “Kyrie Irving, worldwide brand and transcendent bucket getter” to rise to the surface. He has the dynamism and the sheer scoring ability to make his next few seasons something we haven’t seen in a while. Would we even raise our eyebrows if he led the league in scoring for the next three years straight? This is what he was made to do.
If Kyrie Irving really wants to be The Guy, I say we let him.
