MIAMI — Leave it to Kyrie Iriving. Ruining basketball teams is no longer enough. Now, along with his buddy LeBron James, he’s doing his best to win this year’s NBA Finals as well.
These two players may know that the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat will play the crucial third game of a championship series that is currently tied at 1-1 on Wednesday. This final, while fascinating, didn’t garner the same ratings as the previous two conference finals, a fact the NBA would certainly like to change.
So it must be particularly annoying that LeBron and Kyrie have somehow again found a way to suck much of the oxygen out of the room, once again turn the game’s spotlight their way, and generally aim to make this moment more about themselves to make the NBA.
“That’s what LeBron does,” says an NBA source who has worked with LeBron. “He can’t help it.”
The same goes for Kyrie.
The most recent example is The Athletic’s report Monday that Irving, a forthcoming free agent, has contacted his former teammate to see if James is interested in joining him in Dallas.
That’s absurd for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the timing, in the middle of a series that deserves fans’ attention but isn’t yet pulling them in the way it should.
First, the Dallas Mavericks have nothing to offer the Lakers for a signed LeBron James — unless they’ve lost their collective sanity and wanted to send Luka Doncic west.
Again: absurd stuff.
With no players or picks that Los Angeles would even remotely consider — and therefore no way for the kind of sign-and-trade you’d likely need to make the numbers work under the new CBA — would be the only one other way this could happen The Lakers bought out LeBron James and allowed him to travel to Dallas freely with no return.
A third time: This is absurd stuff.
And yet Irving or James (or both) made sure that this supposedly private conversation found its way to a newscaster whose every utterance becomes a narration.
Notable: James has made no secret of his desire to play with Irving again, and even if Kyrie did reveal that information, it was almost certainly a LeBron-sanctioned operation.
It’s about leverage, or the misguided notion that one or both of those stars can leverage it — and, according to NBA league sources familiar with the situation, a related message from Irving to the Lakers: Pay me if you want me and don’t expect discounts.
“LeBron isn’t going to Dallas,” a source said. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s about Kyrie (General Manager of the Lakers) telling Rob (Pelinka) that he’s not taking a discount. And that LeBron is trying to put some pressure on.”
Ironies pile on top of ironies here.
First, it was Irving who left Cleveland years ago shortly after helping James and the Cavaliers win a championship. That exit–many would call it a betrayal–was followed by passive-aggressive and downright-aggressive shots at…LeBron.
After that, Irving never had anything remotely comparable in success. The Celtics were and are better without him now that he’s gone. The Brooklyn Nets bet a lot on him and that led to disaster – James Harden forced himself out for a year and later the whole thing fell apart.
That Kevin Durant is in Phoenix, Harden is preparing for a decision to stay in Philadelphia or return to Houston, and Irving is in Dallas but also appears willing to dashed their hopes speaks to the unreliability he has alongside his basketball size always brought .
Irony also emanates from LeBron’s side. King James may be a basketball king—personally I consider him the game’s GOAT—but he’s been almost as bad a shadow GM in his career as he is a stunning, towering player.
The past trading session certainly demonstrates this. When James’ latest plan, the ill-fated Russell-Westbrook experiment, was reduced to rubble, Pelinka was finally free to conduct business without the king’s ill-chosen decrees.
What a concept: A GM becomes a GM.
The result was a not-so-sexy but hugely successful haul: Rui Hachimura, D’Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt and Malik Beasley sparked a late-season renaissance for the Lakers. Between the Feb. 9 close and the end of the regular season, they had the fourth-best record in the NBA and the best in the Western Conference.
Then they also reached the finals of the Western Conference.
Yet here we are, in June, with the Finals in full swing and James and Irving divulging a private plan between themselves to force a reunion that, like most of LeBron’s plans and all of Kyrie’s, will come down to one thing utter and total Catastrophe.
And to make matters worse – to add to the certain damage that will happen as every team teams up with Kyrie over the next year – these two stars weave their understated, not-so-subtle, non-working leverage play in the middle an NBA finals should be the focus.
That’s the unwritten rule here: don’t distract from the game’s showcase event.
That’s why Adam Silver told the media in Denver last week that he would wait until after the Finals to announce the “additional information” the NBA had uncovered and the resulting penalty Ja Morant is expecting. Because of this, a lot of NBA news will have to wait.
However, this has always been the way of LeBron and Kyrie. At least that’s what they have in common. The need, or maybe the lack of awareness, to create moments that should be about others.
Because this sideshow could have waited. The notion that LeBron will be a Maverick next season, according to numerous NBA sources and common sense, is as ludicrous as the notion that LeBron was actually contemplating retirement after the Lakers were tipped off by the Denver Nuggets a few weeks ago were defeated.
But there we were again: while we should have been talking about Denver’s first-ever Finals appearance and the greatness of his own two-time MVP Nikola Jokic, the conversation turned to a failed Lakers team and James’ false thoughts about walking away.
Once again, we’re faced with a whole load of see-through junk that distracts us from what really matters while reminding us of the fact those who spread it would rather not have known: That LeBron James is still amazingly bad off the field when making shots and the Kyrie Irving isn’t worth the effort.