Don’t look now, but there is a Kyriennaisance happening in Dallas
Don’t get me wrong: The memory of this Mavericks season is still always going to be the Luka Doncic trade. In fact, it’s probably going to be the memory of the next 10 seasons. But once you parse through the 46 articles about how this trade is going to, like… cause social upheaval in Manitoba and set science back 40 years, there’s a pretty neat story on page C4:
Kyrie Irving is having the perfect year.
It’s not that he’s having his best year — guys in year 15 don’t usually do that, and he’s just about average for his career in most scoring categories. But he has been exactly what the Mavericks needed him to be: the best player on a solid team that needs a good playoff run like it needs water. Or maybe air. And he’s done it without a shred of the problematic public commentary that we all became far too used to.
Irving has been a special basketball player since I was in 3rd Grade, but his on-court awesomeness always went with unsavory off-court behavior. And we need to always acknowledge the larger character of anyone we are critiquing or praising. Until last year, he was not someone that any team was eager to get into business with, and for good reasons.
While all that was going on, it became easy to forget that a functional Kyrie Irving is quite possibly the sickest basketball player ever, with handles and airborne control so clean you’d think he had wings and was playing with a yo-yo. He’s one of the NBA’s original magicians, the type of player who makes you question how-the-literal-heck that thing you just saw happened in the real world and not a cartoon. In a way, he walked so Doncic’s wizardry could run.
But now, he has to sprint. The last two years have been free of new controversy, and Irving became one of the league’s most important veteran stars on a team that went to the NBA Finals a year ago. That team has been… uh, destroyed, but Irving has been amazingly productive even in the chaotic party-bus-from-hell the Mavericks are now in.
And guess what: Irving now has to drive that bus.
With Doncic’s banishment, Irving is now responsible for creating the vast majority of Mavericks’ offense, and who knows how healthy his new co-star Anthony Davis will be at any single point on the space-time continuum. And he’s doing it. In Irving’s last five games, he’s scored more than 30 points four times, and is basically taking 22-plus shots per game. Yes, the Mavericks are only 5-5 since trading Doncic, but Irving just looked like the best player on the court in a game against Doncic and LeBron James. That’s not a guy any team wants to mess with in the playoffs.
Irving might be eligible for All-NBA awards this year — he’s already missed 12 games and is one ankle tweak away from missing the 65 game minimum for eligibility — but if he makes it, he will be an instant inclusion on at least the third team, and his recent play could see him easily usurp a spot on the second team, which would be his first nod since 2021.
But none of that really matters, since Irving’s main job right now is to make Mavericks fans feel better about the state of the world. He has (somehow) become the calm face of reason on a team that doesn’t look like they know what they’re doing. Mavericks fans need a certified professional, and it’s a testament to both the team’s current state and Irving’s growth as a person that he’s able to be that for them right now. His demeanor and stability, words we would never has used to describe Kyrie two years ago, have been bigger than basketball.
And he’s nailing it, showing Dallas that they still have a true No. 1 in the cruel world that just shipped their homegrown one off for a bag of Flamin’ Hot BBQ Ruffles chips and a jar of dill pickles. Even in a loss, scoring 35 in that Lakers game was an an act of profound empathy, allowing Mavericks fans one twinkle of hope on the darkest of dark nights.
Can this Kyrie-captained ship win the NBA Finals? Without a healthy Anthony Davis, no, but with him, we can start having that conversation. And even if they win the Finals, the Luka trade is still an absolute calamity — Nico Harrison won’t be getting away with this under any circumstances as long as I’m around. But if they somehow pull this off, it probably won’t be on Davis’ shoulders: it’ll be on Irving’s.
He hasn’t been asked to save a team from the depths of sadness since the 2018 Celtics, and that looked like an ice cream sundae compared to this disaster. He also let it melt. He looks poised to do everything in his power to avoid that this time. So yeah, there have been better Kyries, but this is the perfect one for this moment.
