The Reinvention of Kyrie Irving

Ringer illustration Reneged promises. Sabotaged superteams. Trade requests. A suspension. And now ... quiet. How did the NBA's most turbulent personality become the stabilizing force of the Dallas Mavericks? "The more that you get out of your own way and you become more selfless, the more opportunities come to you," Irving says. When the Dallas Mavericks pulled off a monumental—and somewhat controversial—trade for Kyrie Irving in February 2023, they knew it wouldn't save their season. "There's not a place in history that shows that that actually works in the middle of the season," Mavs general manager Nico Harrison told The Ringer earlier this year. And it didn't; Dallas went 10-18 the rest of the way as Irving and Luka Doncic worked through the early, stilted days of their partnership and the Mavs, who had an inside track on the playoffs, slipped out of the postseason mix entirely. "The biggest thing was that we got a little sample size of Kyrie and Luka," Harrison said. "And we knew at that time that we didn't have the right players surrounding those guys." So the front office went to work identifying what this new version of the team needed most, and Irving went to work making sure that a Mavericks season wouldn't end that way again. "I think failure will inspire you more than you can imagine," Irving says. "And not being able to make the playoffs last year definitely hurt. Stung. Brought a lot of pain. And the only way I felt—other than doing my prayer meditation—able to express some of those emotions was going on a basketball court." There are players for whom the court is purely a practical space. Then there's Kyrie, whose moves flow together into something rhythmic and alive. Last postseason, Irving watched teams struggle under the weight of playoff pressure, forgetting themselves. He watched his peers adapt—and thrive—in the fire. And then, still stewing over the end of his season, he would head to a community college gym just a few blocks from where LeBron James (one of Irving's previous superstar running mates) and the Lakers were mounting their own playoff run to take out his frustrations on imaginary defenders in imaginary scenarios, grasping at the sorts of basketball trials that can never really be replicated. Now, just a year later, the trials come to Irving. The Mavericks are heading to the NBA Finals for a date with the Boston Celtics, a proper 64-win juggernaut that rolled its way through the Eastern Conference. This is Doncic's first time on the Finals stage and Irving's first time back since he played with the Cavaliers in 2017—after which he was traded to the Celtics at his own request and pledged to re-sign before later bolting in free agency. What a long, strange trip it's been. Promises reneged on. A superteam that never quite was. Coaching controversies. Major injuries. Vaccination turmoil. A tweet so ill advised and antisemitic that it warranted a joint statement from Kyrie, the Nets, and the Anti-Defamation League. Another trade request. And then … quiet. One of the noisiest, most turbulent stories in the league took a turn for the ordinary—though that's hardly the right word for the Mavericks' improbable run through the West and perhaps the most surprising chapter of Irving's career. "Now that I'm in my 30s, I'm able to kind of stand on my own square more comfortably, more confidently, and know what my presence holds," Irving says. His performance in these playoffs has been nothing short of sensational. Yet all throughout the season, his coaches and teammates in Dallas have raved most about his spirit. "Just working with him, just playing with him, it's a pleasure," Doncic says. "No matter what, he's always in a positive energy." It's a characterization that some in Brooklyn or Boston might find unrecognizable. Which is a credit to Irving, in a way, though only for doing now what he wouldn't then. The subtle shifts in Kyrie's game this season point to genuine self-reflection, as do the not-so-subtle shifts in the way the eight-time All-Star interacts with the world around him. The results have been astonishing: the same brilliant scoring that Irving's last two teams banked on, but without the disruption that pulled those teams apart. Life in the NBA is an ongoing education; even the stars of the league are asked constantly to adapt—to find their place in things, and then find it again, and again, and again. That's particularly true for Irving, who has wandered from contender to contender in search of the person and player he's supposed to be. "I'm grateful because it wasn't an easy road," he says, "and I was able to grow as a person as quick as I was growing as a player." The Mavericks simply wouldn't be here otherwise. Their path to the Finals was paved with Luka stepbacks, well-coordinated defense, pitch-perfect role players, and more lob dunks than any other playoff team could muster. It was charted, however, by the hard-won lessons of the most experienced player on the roster. Irving didn't just find his way back to the Finals after seven years in the wilderness. Contrary to his reputation, he brought the Mavericks with him. If Luka is the organizing principle of the Mavericks, then Kyrie is their means of stability. You can feel it when the shot clock winds down and teammates—Doncic included—scan the court to find Irving. You can see it in the ease of a possession when Kyrie is stationed just a pass away, making any trap or double-team an act of defensive self-destruction. It comes out in the burgeoning confidence of so many younger Mavericks who are navigating the first postseason of their careers with his guidance, and the assurances Irving gives to veteran role players when their games start to wobble. "I think they look to me for that sense of calmness, that sense of peace," he says. And that they find it in Irving, of all people, is a striking reflection of how much has changed. "It's just his energy," Daniel Gafford says. "His aura." The word aura comes up quite a bit when Irving's teammates describe his impact—speaking to something bigger than his professional reputation and more metaphysical than simple respect. It's a glow, unmistakable and emanating outward, and it took Irving years to figure out what to do with it. "When you're 24 or 23 years old, you feel like you're a leader," Irving says. "But you don't know what it really takes to run an organization—or really touch guys on and off the court, where you give them a lot of confidence and you exude that belief in them." This is a radically different tack from when Kyrie played in Boston six years ago. Even he agrees that some of the criticism of his tenure there is fair; it was startling, even then, how much bile burbled up from the Celtics locker room under his leadership. What began with a devastating opening-night injury to Gordon Hayward quickly devolved into infighting and defensiveness. After a bad road trip in his second season in Boston, Irving—then just 26 years old himself—crowed for more veteran help on the team, which had a fledgling Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. After a tough loss, Irving again bemoaned his team's lack of experience. "What's the big picture?" Irving asked in January 2019. "What are we doing here? These are a lot of things that I don't think some of my teammates have faced, just every single day. It's not easy to be great. So the things you're doing, that you've done your entire career, of being able to coast by in certain situations and you've gotten away with your youth and stuff like that—being on a championship ball club, you can't get away with that." By his second season in Boston, Irving had called LeBron to apologize for once having been the young player who wanted more—and perhaps for underestimating what carrying the weight of a franchise really feels like. "The greatest thing I learned from Boston was just being able to manage not only my emotions, but just what's going on on a day-to-day basis of being a leader of a team, or being one of the leaders—and having young guys around you that have their own goals," Irving says. "But you have to learn how to put the big picture first. Leaving those guys, JT and JB and some of the guys that are still remaining on that team, like Al Horford, … we had a great time to bond, a great time to go through some tough times—not just on the court. I know in due time, a lot of that full story will come out when it's appropriate. But I had a great time in Boston just being able to learn and grow as a person." Irving took on a leadership role with the Celtics because he was a young, championship-minted star eager to elevate a team of his own. In Brooklyn, however, he wound up as a leader more as a matter of accounting. The best and highest-paid players controlled the ball and influenced decisions and shaped the future of the team. Yet when it came time to lead, Irving often wasn't available or accountable—including by making himself a part-time player amid New York's COVID-19 vaccination rules, getting suspended, and once just disappearing from the team entirely. Those Nets remain the strangest and most implosive superteam on record: one that began in injury; steeped itself in needless controversy, often centered on Irving; and produced a single playoff series win in four years of basketball static. "We're all human," Mavericks coach Jason Kidd says. "We're all gonna make mistakes. But when you look at Kai, we don't see that perception of what's been written in the past. We're only in the present. And what he's doing is rewriting his journey." The fact that Dallas had to give up only Dorian Finney-Smith, Spencer Dinwiddie, a future first-round pick, and two second-round picks to acquire Irving could go down as a heist of a trade—and perhaps it already has. Yet in the moment, it was also market value for a star with such corrosive risk that many franchises wanted no part in trading for him. Maybe Irving needed that. Failure may be a great teacher, but it really has nothing on spectacular request-a-trade-from-the-ruins-of-your-own-superteam kind of failure. "When you get that role or people start … asking you about leadership, you gotta understand that when you're in that position, failure is gonna be part of it," Irving says. "Making mistakes is gonna be part of it. And almost embarrassment is part of it, too—because sometimes you're gonna get it right, and sometimes you're gonna get it completely wrong." These days, there are few players in the league as highly regarded among their peers as Irving. His finishes confound even the best in the world. His moves have other stars watching his highlights on loop, retracing his steps. His word goes a long way, particularly when it's a word of encouragement. Since Irving arrived in Dallas, he has made it a point to endorse and encourage the talents of 21-year-old Jaden Hardy, who gave the Mavs a much-needed jolt in the Western Conference finals. He braced P.J. Washington for the practical realities of his first playoff appearance: the demands, the scrutiny, the distractions. Irving helped both of the team's bigs—Gafford and rookie Dereck Lively II—to process and put away mistakes throughout the season, allowing them to play their game when it mattered most. "Since day one, he's been spitting the knowledge and the wisdom that he has of the game to everybody on the team," Derrick Jones Jr. says. "Not just me, and not just a few people. He's letting everybody know everything that he knows about the game." He's also letting his teammates know, in his way, that he has their back. "I used to think leadership was just about me, me, me and taking on the brunt of all the responsibility," Irving says. "No. That's not even close to it." Leadership doesn't come from simply standing in front; it's a function of protecting the people around you. The way Irving operates on the floor gives his teammates a sense of calm. The reassurances that come with that build a role player's confidence in what they do best. And the responsibility Irving does take gives cover to the shooters and finishers and designated defenders who keep the Mavs rolling, allowing them to play free. It's enough to make you want to believe in his capacity for change. In what he calls the team's postgame "therapy sessions," Irving is often still the first in the locker room to put a voice to something that needs to be addressed. Yet by the time Irving addresses the media, no one gets thrown under the bus—a departure from his frustrated venting in Brooklyn and Boston. Sometimes what separates a contender from a champion is the ability to close ranks. To protect those who protect you. In the final minutes of Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, Irving did something extremely out of character: He stepped to the line with the game in the balance, and—against the chicken-hungry screams of the Target Center crowd—bricked a pair of free throws. "As a young player," he says, "I definitely would have been wallowing in my emotions." As a veteran leader for this Mavs team, he was lifted up by the culture he helped foster. From every corner came reassurance: first through the encouragement of teammates who picked him up, one after another, and then through a game-winning bomb from Luka that sealed the Mavs' comeback and ultimately swung the series. "Now, I'm just feeling the embrace leaving the court and knowing that this is a team success—a journey that we're on," he said after the game. "This is our moment." There may not be a player who more deeply understands what it means to play alongside a superstar than Irving. The future Hall of Famer is a basketball historian, but in many ways he's already lived the most relevant histories: a bond with maybe the greatest to ever play, the hard climb to the pinnacle of the sport, the tension in ego on a would-be contender, the rise and fall of a superteam, and now, a rebirth in helping another, younger great write his own legend. Together, Doncic and Irving have turned themselves into one of the league's most complementary star pairings—no small task for two perimeter players, as some of Irving's former teammates can attest. If the on-court relationship between Doncic and Irving looks simple, that means they're hiding the work well. Irving is incredibly conscious of the ways that putting two stars on the floor can reduce both to their simplest forms and the offense around them to something spare and lifeless. "When you have two premier scorers on a team or three premier scorers, you're trying to make it work," Irving says. "And it's your turn, my turn. Sometimes as a player, you can lose sight of the rest of the court and what's going on." Even when the Mavericks stars are cooking in isolation, they want everything to feel connected—tethered, at all times, to four live threats. When the Dallas offense is working as intended, pick-and-rolls feed into lobs and isos pivot into kickouts to the 3-point line. When it's not, the role players around Doncic and Irving are shrunk down to their barest functions: not shooting, but spacing. Not cutting to the basket, but simply occupying a defender. "I like to compare it to fifth grade, sixth grade basketball," Irving says, "where you get it one time and then I get it one time, and then when things don't work, we try to give it to somebody else who hasn't shot in six minutes because we've been shooting the whole time." Irving has seen enough of these star-driven offenses to understand the power of that kind of inertia. It's so, so easy to give the ball to Luka and get out of the way—just as it was with LeBron or Kevin Durant. It's also damning, at a certain level of competition, when a team sacrifices all of its free-form potential for the sake of the straightest possible line. Dallas operated that way by default before trading for Irving and expanding the range of its offense. The reason these Mavericks have made it this far is because they never left Jones or Washington for dead in the corner or forgot about Gafford or Lively when they ducked in from the baseline. "At the end of the day, they put a lot of trust in everybody that's out there on the floor with them," Gafford says. And the only reason the Mavs have a chance to compete with a team like the Celtics is because Doncic has evolved into the game's most advanced playmaker and Irving knows exactly how to use the threat of his do-it-all scoring to unlock everyone around him. "That's the growth that I've had, is just being aware of how the game of basketball is supposed to be played," Irving says. "And really appreciating the guys who came before me that showed me the formula and have been teaching me that it's about a team game. The more that you get out of your own way and you become more selfless, the more opportunities come to you." This is a fully realized offense, like Boston's, as opposed to the superteams content to let great players dribble around. In a way, playing that style for much of his time in Brooklyn prepared Irving for some of the instant offense that makes him so potent now. Earlier in his career, Kyrie's handle was sometimes an indulgence—a way to explore the space on his own time. When Irving attacks off the catch for Dallas, his wizardry with the ball is a vehicle to move fast—to push past a scrambling defense and get exactly where he means to. "I think the true testament of greatness is being able to adapt with other great players and not lose your identity," he says. Sometimes the best version of Irving moves the defense, makes the right reads, and ends up with only 12 points. Other times, the best version might attack until the defense breaks—bludgeoning through a quarter or a half in pursuit of something greater. Kyrie has always had the skill to toggle between these modes, igniting at a moment's notice in a way that now makes him a perfect counterpoint to Luka's slow-played manipulations. "I think the difference between me now and me a few years ago is just allowing those external voices to infiltrate to what I believe the game is for me," Irving says. To trust in the coaches and teammates and "masters of the game" who taught him to see the truth in it—a truth he now shares with Doncic. "When I can pass on the knowledge and wisdom that was given to me, and explain it to him, and encourage him to be better, then I feel like I'm doing my job," Irving says. "And that's not just as a basketball player, that's just as a person." The core of that idea—of sharing perspective with a younger teammate—isn't so different from what Irving might have done back in his Boston days. Yet all of the trappings around that message make it feel totally distinct. Something has shifted in Irving's tone this season—or maybe in his aura. There is an acceptance of what he cannot change: namely, the hassles of the basketball-industrial complex, which turns his favorite mode of expression into something that must be bought, sold, and inspected. It comes with interviews, appearances, selling sneakers, and the pains of being a public figure whose words can make news. "I just stopped being a kid towards this industry and really grew up and grew my wings," he says. The new Kyrie seems less jaded—less bothered. Less irritated by what didn't work on a given night and more focused on what could the next. Irving still doesn't seem thrilled to field questions from the podium, but he politely entertains the prods about what he was thinking and how he was feeling and the occasional diversion into Xs and Os. And while doing so, Irving will sometimes take a moment—even in the middle of a thought—to specifically address any young basketball players who might be watching. A clear, unmistakable intention. Sometimes, Irving will dive into what basketball can teach us about ourselves or some greater truth of the game and the way it should be played. "It's a whole new generation that's watching me now," Irving says. "So I'm aware of that. Very responsible with what I say and what I do and how I approach my day-to-day life. And as a young person, I can say this: I wasn't really thinking about any of that." Now, on the biggest possible stage, Irving can rectify that. Every game is a chance to reach that target audience and to speak to all the lessons learned too late.

The Reinvention of Kyrie Irving

Trending News