CLEVELAND, Ohio — Basketball’s premiere magician is performing his old tricks again. We’ve seen them before, but we never get bored. Because the classic spells he casts — dribble tricks that boggle the mind, fadeaways that break a defense’s spirit and lefty finishes so feathery that you forget he’s right-handed — thrill us too much to go out of style.
We’ve waited too long for Mavs guard — or, around here, former Cavs guard — Kyrie Irving to re-appear (and make defenders disappear) on the NBA’s main stage. Irving’s teams won just four playoff series (including two while he was injured in 2018) in six seasons between his Cleveland exit (summer of 2017) and his 2024 NBA Finals run that continues Thursday against the Celtics. And the reasons for Irving’s playoff drought run the gambit.
He missed 92 regular season games due to injury from 2018-20 He missed 43 during the 2020-21 season thanks in large part to New York’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and his refusal to follow it. The Nets suspended him for “at least” five games in 2022 (Irving would miss eight) after Irving shared an antisemitic video on Twitter and bumbled the ensuing apology. That’s before we consider the fact that both of Irving’s co-stars in Brooklyn (James Harden and Kevin Durant) requested a trade before he did.
But now that Irving has re-discovered stability in Dallas, he’s reminding us of his singular talent. He’s refreshing our memories of his value to a championship cont.
