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Kyrie Irving says the real '[blankety-blanks] want two,' three or four NBA championships
Kyrie Irving, blessed at an early age with a franchise all to himself and then the security of playing through his prime alongside one of the greatest players in NBA history, has an enviable sense of immediacy for someone we find so early in his journey.
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The Cleveland Cavaliers point guard is the longest-tenured leader of a crew that has lost four of six to fall into a virtual tie for the top seed in the Eastern Conference with fewer than ten games to go in 2016-17. Irving doesn’t just want the Cavs to get back to thinking about shading earlier or connecting more positively on the defensive end against Chicago on Thursday night. He wants his teammates, seemingly sated with the idea that LeBron will save all, thinking about not one but two and perhaps more NBA championships to come:
“You can’t rely on just thinking that one championship is enough. It’s natural for human beings to just get comfortable. To rely on just having won a championship. But if you a muthaf***** you want two, you want three, you want four. And if you dedicate yourself more like you say you do, then you want more. And I want more. I’m going to go take it.”
Irving went on to say that there is “no comparison” between what the Cavaliers are going through now – losers of 10 of 17, 22nd-ranked defense with April’s rent nearly due – with what they faced last June. This team should be better prepared to handle not only deficits, but all manner of tumult, due to what the team went through while down 3-1 in the 2016 NBA Finals:
From Chris Manning at Fear the Sword:
“The emotion is different. Everyone has grown,” he said of that comparison. “Everyone has kind of gone their own way and now we come into a head where we’ve got to figure it out.”
From Ramona Shelburne at ESPN:
“We know we have the culture here. We know we have the guys,” he said. “We know when we’re not playing up to our level. We just allow it to pass and pass and it turns out to kind of be a s— show.”
Kyrie Irving then made a direct, straight-line connection between the words said in one time zone, to his actions in another: the Cleveland point guard showed up to Thursday’s practice hours upon hours earlier than his teammates in Chicago’s Central Time.
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The point Kyrie is attempting to enforce is a salient one. If the Cleveland Cavaliers felt strong enough to feel as if they were always in with a chance with LeBron James and Co. on board for a series of one-game playoffs against the 73-win Golden State Warriors in 2016, why can’t the Cavs keep the same odds working in their favor in some of these 2017 regular season losses?
Then again, let’s look at the losses: Washington, at San Antonio, at Houston, in Denver, in Los Angeles against the Clippers, at Boston, with a home-and-home against the Heat, and against those stupid Bulls.
Those are all teams that should be allowed to sometimes top the defending champion Cleveland Cavaliers, injured as they’ve ever been through a chunk of that stretch, especially when the Cavs are on the road. Take nothing away from the combatants.
Still, those should be coin-flip games for the champs, and the Cavaliers have come away losers in all of the recent bigger games save for a home contest against the Jazz (far-Western also-rans) and a win over Atlanta just before the Hawks’ 5-10 swoon. If the Cavs should have the best odds in the world in any 48-minute feature that stars LeBron James, why doesn’t that allowance work more often, and against any of the teams listed above?
Props in place for the Wizards, the Nuggets, the Heat, Celtics and even the Clippers. Take nothing away from those Spurs. Take everything away from those Bulls. Why couldn’t the Cavs have just taken one?
This might be why, according to Joe Vardon at Cleveland.com, veteran James Jones did a bit of challenging on his own on Thursday:
After the Cavs lost their ninth game in 15 tries Monday against the Spurs, 14-year vet James Jones spoke in the locker room, asking rhetorically what the players really wanted out of this season, a source told cleveland.com.
These kinds of speeches are not unusual, especially at this point in the season with the playoffs fast approaching, but this kind of losing in March is rare for the Cavs. And it’s not what one would expect from a defending champion with this kind of talent.
Neither LeBron James nor Kyrie Irving barked at teammates in the locker room, the source said, though the source confirmed what Irving said Monday — that the losing and the travel have frayed nerves.
LeBron James, professional basketball talker for a healthy portion of his day, kept those nerves in check while speaking in Chicago:
Part of you should think the Cavs – who have not played since Monday’s loss in San Antonio – should be ready to beat the ridiculous Bulls by 45 points on Thursday night.
Talent will usually out, unless some extreme mismatch or personality clash is involved, in a seven-game playoff series. The argument between top-talent versus deep-talent has raged for ages, though, dating back to Bill Russell and the Celtics’ battles through the 1960s, to Bill Walton’s Blazers taking on the ABA All-Stars in 1977, to Michael Jordan against his various 60-win combatants in the 1990s to Kobe and Shaq’s trip through the league at the start of the century up to and including LeBron’s participation in the last six and possibly seven NBA Finals.
In adding top-talent to deep-talent in the form of the sensible and superb Kevin Durant, though, the Golden State Warriors appear to have mixed the best parts of both worlds in previously unimaginable ways. It would then be up to LeBron and his Cavaliers to somehow find another gear to get to the final podium yet again, come June. This is where the unequal allotments of rest sent LeBron’s way would seemingly pay off.
Younger (Kyrie Irving) and older (James Jones) helpers of both great renown and little statistical note still want to have something to say in the months before that expected Golden State/Cleveland showdown, a showdown that looks more and more perilous the deeper we get into March. Not just with Golden State acting like a far superior team to Cleveland, that issue is for another day, but the Cavaliers’ seeming inability to handle its business down the stretch of the regular season. Just getting out the East, for this learned crew full of players who were around for 3-1, would appear to be a problem.
The 32-year old LeBron James can’t play through another six weeks of one-game playoffs, though, starting with the remaining eight regular season games. His helpers, his helpers in the starting lineup, have to start to turn Cleveland’s fortunes.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
