This, Dallas Mavericks fans, is the Kyrie Irving Experience.
His arrival isn’t about his alluring goalscoring skills, and it never should be. Or the no-arguments-anywhere talent he embodies in a league based on basketball greatness. Not all the fame and greatness that one could imagine when you combine those goalscoring abilities and towering talent with players like Luka Doncic.
It’s losing that has defined Irving, his teams, and those organizations for nearly six years that have learned too late that what feels enticing and desirable from afar becomes a slow-moving, organizational disaster film up close.
The crazy thing at this point isn’t that Irving does that with teams. The crazy thing is that teams, fans, NBA media and probably at least one GM somewhere are keeping their eye on Irving’s potential free hand this summer and not seeing Irving for who he really is. talent blind, like love. And it also breaks things when it becomes toxic.
Case in point: The Mavs’ disastrous 24 games since taking over Irving at close.
Dallas is 8-16 over that range. To put that in perspective, only four teams have worse records over that span: the Pistons, Rockets and Spurs — the three worst teams in the league — and the Trail Blazers, who recently knocked out Damian Lillard.
Dallas is a shocking 4-11 when Doncic and Irving play together. That’s atrocious, and all of those losses since he traded for the erratic star have taken Dallas from sixth place in the West when Irving was with Brooklyn to 11th now that he’s with Dallas. His arrival and what we’ve seen so far has reduced SportsLine’s odds of the Mavs making the playoffs from 58% to 6%.
And if Dallas misses the playoffs, Doncic would be the fifth-highest single-season scorer in NBA history to miss the postseason, averaging 32.8 points per game.
This is the Kyrie Irving Effect. And that has been the case for a long time.
In terms of his team’s winning percentages, Kyrie’s clubs have either been as good or better off the court over the past five seasons. Before this season’s trade, Brooklyn won 60% of the games Kyrie appeared in, but won 67% of the games he played in. I wrote about it back in November. His numbers are slightly better in Dallas — he wins at 37% clip when he plays versus 33% when he doesn’t — but a .368 win rate is no way back to the Western Conference Finals in late May. Tee times are mid-April by air.
And that’s just the numbers side of the story.
A trip down the Kyrie memory lane includes: Leaving the Cavaliers despite not being far from an NBA championship. The Celtics’ success since leaving Boston. James Harden, forcing his way out of Brooklyn shortly after witnessing the Kyrie Irving Effect firsthand, and the consequent arrival of Ben Simmons for that organization. The anti-Semitic ugliness. The implosion of Brooklyn’s team and the fact that Durant is now a sun. Etc.
The Kyrie-Irving effect can be measured in mathematics. But it can also be seen from 10,000 feet, where a clear picture of the destruction and dysfunction has become fully visible.
A team chaos, Kyrie Irving is a walking avatar of how incredibly difficult it is to build an NBA champion. Because he should win. He just doesn’t.
We do a great job recognizing players who are clutch or wonderful leaders, players who have those intangible and real traits that help teams be better versions of themselves. But we pretend the opposite isn’t true, that talented people can’t also be annoying teammates with a not-good net effect.
Kyrie Iriving is talented. He’s fascinating. He has a rare gift at the highest level of the game to get buckets. He is an NBA champion, having won a three-point showdown with Steph Curry at the height of an NBA Finals in 2016. He’s a statistical marvel, even this year he’s flirting with the rare 50/40/90 season – and that would be his second.
And yet he loses.
He makes his team worse.
And that’s the dilemma. There’s massive pressure to win in the NBA, and I’ve sat with front-office executives who have made compelling arguments that Irving isn’t good for a team… only in the next breath, after the stories and anecdotes and grimaces, saying so , they would take him immediately if given the chance.
Perhaps this season finally showed that Irving’s gifts aren’t the whole equation.
But in a league where rare and big talent have their own siren song, and the pressure to find a way to assert yourself can cloud the judgment of front-office decision makers, who should know better by now, chances are that the Mavericks debacle is bigger is likely to encourage another team to make a similar mistake.
win winners. And Irving has shown time and time again that he’s not one of them. No longer.