The Browns lost, but the Dolphins aren’t winners
September 26, 2016NEO High School Football Week 5: Top ten teams win big
September 26, 2016Lighting up the scoreboard and breaking opponent’s ankles with incredible ball skills is what Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving had been best known for over the first four seasons of his NBA career. Year 5 changed the perspective and talking points on him forever. The 24-year-old validated himself and all who lauded his skillset in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. The Golden State Warriors couldn’t have blown a 3-1 series lead without Irving making a three-pointer with 54 seconds remaining to give the wine and gold the lead and the first professional championship in Cleveland since 1964.
The Golden State Warriors couldn’t have blown a 3-1 series lead without Irving making a three-pointer with 54 seconds remaining to give the wine and gold the lead and the first professional championship in Cleveland since 1964.
Not only did the dagger of a shot make Irving a NBA champion, along with his other teammates, it changed his life as he explained to cleveland.com’s Joe Vardon over the weekend.
“Yes, my life’s changed drastically. It’s kind of, you’re waiting for that validation from everyone, I guess, to be considered one of the top players in the league at the highest stage. That kind of changed. I was just trying to earn everyone’s respect as much as I could.”
He earned respect around the NBA. He cemented himself as one of the top point guards in a league chock full of good point guards. In case you don’t remember The Shot,1 here it is for your viewing pleasure:
https://vine.co/v/5Buarnl0ptA
After missing the majority of the 2015 Finals due to a fractured kneecap, the star made the most of his opportunity his second time around.
“I never thought I’d be an NBA champion when I was 24 years old. I just had to re-start, regroup and re-prioritize what I wanted to accomplish as a player and also as a teammate, this summer.”
While nothing may ever compare to the 2016 title, the 2016 season – especially the Finals – will always hold a special place in Irving’s heart. While part of this could be due to the fact that No. 2 played such a major role in the clinching game, the main reason is due to the fact that he wanted revenge against Golden State after being forced to miss the majority of the 2015 Finals.
“Dating back to Game 1 of last year’s Finals, and then this year’s Finals, actually going through it and giving it everything I could, it was just a culmination of everything. The fans, Golden State and Cleveland, the media, as much importance as was on this series, I’d never been a part of anything like that. It was even more special.”
Irving’s rank in Sports Illustrated’s Top 100 players was questioned by many heading into the upcoming season and WFNY’s own Dan Harrington tried to make sense of the star’s No. 25 ranking , but no matter what the point guard does the rest of his career, he will forever be known for The Shot.
During the 2015-16 regulars season, Irving averaged 19.6 points, 3.0 rebounds, 4.7 assists, and 1.1 steals in 31.1 minutes per game while shooting 44.8 percent from the floor and just 32.1 percent from beyond the arc in 53 regular season games. In the playoffs, No. 2 averaged 25.2 points, 3.2 rebounds, 4.4 assists, and 1.6 steals in 36.9 minutes per game while shooting 47.5 percent from the floor and 44.3 percent from three-point land. And to think that he hasn’t even reached his prime yet is truly scary, for the rest of the NBA, not for the Cavs.
Heading into the beginning of training camp on Monday, Irving is not only an NBA champion, but he also won an Olympic gold medal in Rio over the summer. He is one of only four players to ever win both the an NBA title and gold medal in the same summer. The other three? LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen. While Irving may never be able to outperform what he did in the summer of 2016, he hopes he can help the Cavaliers defend their title heading into the 2016-17 season.
- Or, the Dagger if you prefer. [↩]
15 Comments
KI will never have to pay for a beer in NE OH again. Ever.
I’m not sure I see this as too good of a thing. It was a great shot, an incredibly important shot, but his career wasn’t “validated” because his teams performed incredibly poorly without Lebron and Love, and even with them, the Cavs get outscored with Irving on the court. Making a shot, even that important of one, should get him free beers in Cleveland, as RGB said, but it shouldn’t cause him to think that his play has been near the top of the league.
This is a championship-level wet blanket comment. 🙂
I know, I know. I might be the president of the Irving-haters club.
I don’t want to take anything away from how meaningful that shot was. It was of supreme importance. But if Robert Horry, Steve Kerr, or Jim Paxson came out and said their shots validated them as one of the top players in the league, we’d be scratching our heads. We know that hitting a Finals-winning shot does not make one a superstar, all the pieces need to be together.
It seems that Irving has heard what was some very fair criticism, and told everyone to shove it. I want a player who is hungry to improve his game, to not stall the offense a bit too often, to not be such a defensive liability far too often, and simply to not have the team be better with him off the court than on, not the guy who says “I made the big shot, so everything else is fine”.
Truly, Kyrie Irving will never fully understand what he did for the psyche of native Clevelanders
Uh, Steve…Robert Horry coined the term “Big Shot Rob” in Houston, then Kobe glommed onto it when he joined the Lakers and it became his moniker.
And, the team was not better with him off the court in the playoffs. He was playing his way back from injury — no curve for that in regular season?
Sure, give Kyrie a fun nickname too. No one mistook Horry for a star though.
And on a per possession basis, we were even worse with Irving on the court compared to off in the playoffs than the regular season.
Robert Horry made the playoffs 16 times in his career.
Times Horry did better than Irving WS/48 .209 and .210 his 2 playoff seasons = ZERO
One of these players is a star. That player is Kyrie.
Put another way, a total of 15 players have had a postseason where they played at least 700 minutes (to get something statistically significant) and had a WS/48 of .210 or better (Kyrie on that list – no flukes on that list either):
http://www.basketball-reference.com/play-index/psl_finder.cgi?request=1&match=single&type=totals&per_minute_base=36&per_poss_base=100&season_start=1&season_end=-1&lg_id=NBA&age_min=0&age_max=99&is_playoffs=Y&height_min=0&height_max=99&year_min=1995&year_max=2016&birth_country_is=Y&as_comp=gt&pos_is_g=Y&pos_is_gf=Y&pos_is_f=Y&pos_is_fg=Y&pos_is_fc=Y&pos_is_c=Y&pos_is_cf=Y&c1stat=ws_per_48&c1comp=gt&c1val=.205&c2stat=mp&c2comp=gt&c2val=700&c6mult=1.0&order_by=ws
Just look at his stats in the playoffs, especially the last 3 Finals games. The Cavs don’t make it past Game 5 without him.
If you are confirming that Horry is not a star, we are on the exact same page. Hitting a big shot, even a few of them, does not make one a star. That’s my argument. Irving is not validated as a star by hitting a big shot.
By selecting a group that played 700 minutes in a postseason, you’re not so much getting a statistically significant measure as much as selecting guys who played a lot of games, which means their team has gone far, almost certainly the Finals. These teams are almost always overplaying and out -WS/48ing what regular season numbers would suggest. We’re suffering from survivorship bias. We’re missing guys who may have played well. We’re also almost missing a couple Jordan season because his teams were so dominant, and in fact are missing Shaq’s 2001, when his team only had to play 16 games.
For example, in a bunch of seven game series between a 50 win team and a 45 win team, we (and WS/48) would expect the former to win an average of about 3.7 games and the latter 3.3 (roughly, but gets where I’m going). Obviously in just one series, that can’t happen. The team that wins four is going to see a nice boost in their WS/48, when we don’t really know how real it is, as seven games isn’t really enough to truly separate a 50 win team from a 45 win one.
There are many players on those teams. Only the absolute stars hit that threshold of WS/48. Yes, you need to survive and get far to have any chance at reaching a statistically significant sample, but Irving proved what we have seen in his healthy spurts in the regular season (his biggest obstacle). He is an absolute star in the NBA.
Horry, not so much. Great supportive player though.
There are only about seven players a year who have crossed that 700 min threshold since the playoffs expanded in 1984. Not that many.
And even if we could accept WS/48 numbers from the postseason at face value, his regular season numbers are so substantially lower, that we should be highly skeptical about his performance specifically.
Yes, he does some star feats on the court. But we have a player that still sees his team get outscored with him on the court, even in the postseason, despite playing so many minutes with true stars like Lebron and Love. We have to be seriously skeptical about what he adds on the court, as fun as it is to watch him dribble and shoot.
First, he plays thsoe minutes with stars like himself in Love and the best player in the NBA LeBron – but those players also play minutes when he is on the bench. We would have to parse the numbers much further to see the net effect better.
B-R has Irving -0.2 during the regular season in 15/16 in on/off, while returning from a major injury.
Playoffs though he was +3.1 on/off. In 14/15 playoffs he was +7.2
Oh, and hey, look he was +9.2 in on/off in 14/15 regular season.
His .183 WS/48 in 14/15 regular season also demonstrates an ability to achieve high efficiency similar to his playoff scores.
He was -0.8 in the 15/16 playoffs, and +2.3 in the 14/15 playoffs.
And in almost any other case where a guy had a peak season that was so much better than every other one in his career, we wouldn’t be treating that like it an expected baseline. Injuries have hurt him, but injuries are never a positive harbinger. Even in that peak season, he was something like the 38th best player: http://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/year/2015/sort/RPM – the metric that does parse those numbers you are looking for.
We’re obviously not going to convince each other of whether Irving is a star or not, and as I already said, I really wasn’t planning to debate that, but whether hitting that shot should cause him to feel validated as one, and what that might mean for Kyrie’s development going forward.