It’s not that Kyrie has been awful for the Mavs. And since Irving arrived, all their ambitions have collapsed into dust. This is a team that got to the Western Conference Finals with their generational superstar Luka Doncic last year, and they seemed poised to go even further this spring. According to, they have only a one-in-four chance of even reaching the play-in game they’re highly likely to miss the playoffs entirely. Meanwhile, in the less competitive Western Conference, the Mavericks are in significantly worse shape. 7–10 must compete in a series of elimination games, with two of them reaching the playoffs). 6 seed in the Eastern Conference, avoiding the dreaded play-in game (in which playoff seeds No. The Nets traded away two players ostensibly among the 20 greatest in the NBA, but they’re essentially locked into the No. Just look at the two teams’ records since the trade: Life’s too short, you know?Īnd a funny thing happened after Kyrie departed Brooklyn, soon followed by Kevin Durant: The Nets have kept their heads above water, and the Mavericks - who thought themselves so close to winning a title that they saw Irving as the final piece of the puzzle - have fallen apart. If you’re a Nets fan, you probably even felt some measure of relief when he got traded. Even if you love Kyrie’s on-court game - and there remains so much to love - cheering for him now feels like work. One minute you’re convinced he’s going to lead your team to an NBA title, the next he’s refusing to get vaccinated, the next he’s tweeting links to videos involving Holocaust denialism, the next he’s back to talking about winning that title, and then seemingly five minutes later he’s demanding a trade to blow the whole thing up. As Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s terrific cover story in this magazine vividly illustrated, riding the Kyrie roller coaster is, more than anything else, profoundly exhausting. You’d be forgiven if, after the Brooklyn Nets washed their hands of Kyrie Irving by trading him to the Dallas Mavericks back in February, you lost track of what was going on with him.
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