What is next for Kyrie Irving? While We’re Waiting

Happy Tuesday, WFNY!

Now that the Olympics have come and gone, we find September and the start of real football right around the corner. For Kyrie Irving, though, he finally gets to enjoy his summer vacation. Kyrie only had a brief period of downtime between washing the champagne and confetti off him and the start of his workouts for Team USA. Cavaliers’ media day, aka the unofficial kickoff of training camp, was September 28 last year. That was 331 days since Kyrie was last “off” from basketball.

Of course, for many elite players, they are never really off. LeBron James has already organized September workouts for the players in Los Angeles. LeBron has been posting Instagram videos all summer showing his workouts. There’s no resting for those who desire to climb to the top, and even less for those who desire to stay at the top. But having said all that, it really is going to be interesting to watch Kyrie Irving and see if playing for Team USA has any affect on him this season.

It makes sense to worry that playing all summer for Team USA would cause fatigue. And for a player with a history of injuries like Kyrie has, it can make things even more worrisome. But maybe we don’t have to worry. As Neil Paine pointed out last week, there’s no evidence of playing for Team USA hurting players in the next season. In fact, it appears the opposite might be more true.

According to the numbers, however, there’s not really any reason to worry about Dream Teamers coming home from Rio in a weakened state. If anything, playing for Team USA at a big international tournament seems to be associated with a boost in performance the next season.

My colleague Jim Pagels came to that conclusion in 2014 when comparing Team USA members’ per-minute production with what would be predicted by Basketball-Reference’s Simple Projection System, finding that players produced better NBA Player Efficiency Ratings and Win Shares per 48 minutes than expected after donning the Stars and Stripes. My own research backs this up; U.S. players tend to exceed their projected Box Plus/Minus (BPM) by about 0.4 points per 100 possessions the year after playing a major tournament1 for the United States, and they beat projections by nearly 0.7 points/100 possessions after playing in the Olympics specifically.

So the question really on my mind lately is, what is next for Kyrie Irving? At 24 years old, he’s accomplished almost everything he can on the professional level. Rookie of the Year, multiple All-Star games, All-Star game MVP, NBA Championship, Olympic Gold for Team USA, FIBA World Cup MVP. What else is there for Kyrie to accomplish?

Obviously Kyrie wants more Championships. That is most likely his immediate goal. When you’re a top tier player in the NBA and you’re on a team with LeBron James and Kevin Love, you’re hunting titles. But the two big carrots out there that Kyrie has yet to achieve in his professional life are an NBA MVP award and enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. The second one is easy. If Kyrie plays a full career at this level, he’ll get in. Basketball isn’t too picky on who gets into their Hall of Fame. The first one, though, is a pretty big challenge and the one that will require the most out of Kyrie.

For Kyrie to realistically have a chance to win an MVP award, a couple things will probably have to happen. First, Kyrie must continue to improve on defense. Tracking defensive performance analytically is kind of tricky. There are several stats out there that attempt to tell some story of how a player performs on defense, but the numbers sometimes contradict each other. To get the real story you sort of have to take a bunch of them into account at once and see what they are saying.

In Kyrie’s case, the numbers show that he is still a below average defensive player in the NBA. And while there are some signs of small improvement, that improvement has been pretty measured. The eye test shows that Kyrie does give slightly more effort on that end of the court, particularly compared to the complete indifference he showed under Byron Scott. But nobody is mistaking Kyrie for Chris Paul or Patrick Beverley any time soon.

Of course, that’s not to say Kyrie isn’t capable of growing into a decent or even pretty good defensive player. While Kyrie still struggles with on-ball defense, his off-ball defense and general awareness has grown immensely the last couple years. Having re-watched the entire NBA Finals several times this summer, I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the way Kyrie defended Steph Curry off the ball. And I have to say, I’m more impressed now than I was even back in June. There are a couple times where Kyrie struggles to stick with Steph, but for the most part, Kyrie avoided falling asleep and losing him and Kyrie did a pretty solid job fighting through the screens to stay on Steph’s hip.

Kyrie played a defensive effort in the NBA Finals that we rarely saw in the regular season. Not all teams will play their PG off the ball as much as the Warriors do with Curry, but playing that hard when defending players off the ball all season long is a decent place to start.

Of course Kyrie also has to figure out how to be a better defender on the ball so he can stop opposing PGs from attacking the defensive interior with the dribble. When a PG beats his man, it often creates a chain reaction on defense that leads to an open look for someone. That happens far too often for the Cavaliers, and it usually culminates in a late rotation on defense that leads to an easy basket and the Cavs players all standing there looking at each other trying to assign blame.

For a guy with the handles and athletic ability of Kyrie Irving, he is surprisingly slow moving laterally, particularly off a quick first step from the opponent. I’m not a basketball coach so I don’t know how to fix that issue. Some of it might be simple awareness and preparation, studying game film to better understand the opponent’s’ tendencies, positioning, etc. The point is, it’s hard to win an MVP award, especially when your defense stands out for being as poor as it has at times in Kyrie’s career.

The other aspect of Kyrie’s game that probably needs to change if he’s going win an MVP award is his assist numbers. It’s not impossible to win an MVP award as a one-dimensional player. But when you’re on a team with LeBron, it’s hard to imagine a player having the kind of singular statistical season that would be required to win MVP. There are so many factors that go into why Kyrie’s assist numbers are where they are. Again, playing with LeBron James, who requires the ball in his hands an awful lot, it can be hard to find the line between scoring and passing when you get your chances.

All of this has been mostly conjecture, of course. This all makes a major assumption that winning an MVP is even a goal of Kyrie’s. I don’t know Kyrie, I don’t know how he thinks and feels about his career. My point, really, was just if you’re looking for things that Kyrie hasn’t accomplished in his career, it’s really hard to find things. MVP seems like the most obvious thing he’s missing right now.

It has been an unbelievable summer for Kyrie. If he never wins an MVP, who cares? He’s an NBA Champion and an Olympic Champion. If we have to “settle” for just enjoying Kyrie Irving playing really, really good basketball beside LeBron James and competing for titles over the next few years, who can really complain about that?

Kyrie has faced an awful lot of criticism in his time in Cleveland. Even playing for Team USA he faced some criticism as some questioned how much he had the ball in his hands. Others examined how hard it can be to properly rate Kyrie Irving as he embodies so many of the complaints about his game even in his greatest moments.

Sometimes I wish we could all just relax and settle down. Stop worrying about what Kyrie isn’t and just enjoy him for what he is. But settling is rarely the path to greatness. The exciting thing about Kyrie and this team is that he and LeBron have only been teammates for two seasons. They seem capable of bringing out interesting sides of their games and I believe their relationship on the court will only grow. The sky has been the limit for Kyrie his entire career, but he now finds himself at an interesting point in his career.

What’s next? I can’t wait to find out the answer to that question.