Why Kyrie’s Trade Could Ruin His Career

Last week, Brian Windhorst from ESPN reported that Kyrie Irving is wanting out of Cleveland, citing his desire to be the alpha dog on another team where he doesn’t have to play alongside Lebron James. Maybe there are some other factors in Irving’s request to be traded to another team, maybe he didn’t get along with Lebron anymore, maybe he was tired of Lebron being the Jackie Moon type player/coach/GM/real owner of the organization. Regardless of what it is, it will ultimately be the biggest mistake of his career.

First off, Irving has it made. Playing in the Eastern Conference alongside Lebron and Kevin Love is basically a free annual ticket to the NBA Finals year in and year out. With the Cavs big three stars, they have won the East each year and the road to the Finals were never challenging. The Cavaliers breeze through the playoffs regardless of how they play in the regular season, in two of the three seasons since Lebron’s return to Cleveland, the Cavs were the number one seed in the Eastern conference just once, yet  faced minimal resistance on their roads to the Finals. Playing alongside Lebron not only increases his chances at winning titles each year, but also elevates his personal play. Since the return of Lebron in 2014, Kyrie has experienced career highs in points per game, field goals made per game, field goals attempted per game, three pointers made per game, field goal percentage, three point field goal percentage, along with fewer turnovers per game. Simply put, Lebron has been the best thing for Kyrie’s brand and has elevated him to the status of an elite NBA point guard and an NBA Champion. Without Lebron, Irving was a big fish in a little pond being the best player on a team that never won more than 33 games in a weak Eastern Conference and was never close to even sniffing the playoffs.

But now that the cat is out of the bag and Kyrie has made it clear he wants out, where will he end up and wherever he goes, what type of impact will it have on his career? Irving’s list of preferred destinations include: San Antonio, Minnesota, New York, and Miami. Let’s start by acknowledging that if Irving wants to build a winning team with him at the helm, he needs to stay the hell away from the Western Conference. The East was slim on star power before this offseason but since the offseason began, three Eastern Conference All-Stars have moved to the West (Paul George, Paul Millsap, and Jimmy Butler). If Irving moves westward, he is going to have to compete with the champion Warriors, the new and improved Rockets who have the MVP runner-up along with the addition of hall of fame point guard Chris Paul, potentially the 60+ win Spurs (if he doesn’t join them), and a Thunder team that not only has the league MVP but now has acquired All-Star Paul George in exchange for a washing machine and a bag of cracker jacks. The West is loaded and even if he joins Minnesota to play alongside Butler, Wiggins, Towns and the rest of their young core it will not be enough to compete with other teams in that conference for at least three or four years. But the Spurs pose an interesting situation for Irving. The Spurs already have a team that can compete with Golden State when Kawhi Leonard is healthy (remember that the Spurs were wearing GSW out until Leonard got hurt and missed the rest of the series) so joining the number two team in the West automatically gives him a chance to contend for an NBA Title. But would the Spurs benefit from adding Irving? Absolutely not. Irving is an elite point guard but he is not a player that Gregg Popovich will chomp at the bit to acquire. The Popovich way requires players to put the team above themselves and to set aside your ego to make the team better. I don’t know Irving personally, but if his reasoning to leave Cleveland is a result of his unwillingness to play in Lebron’s shadow, he does not have what it takes to play for Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs. To add to that, if he joined San Antonio, he would play in Kawhi Leonard’s shadow, it’s Leonard’s team now and it will be Leonard’s team as long as he is there, Irving would just be playing alongside another MVP caliber players shadow and will want out shortly. It sounds like a promising fit in theory but just won’t work in practice.

Kyrie’s best chance of being a winning player while being the alpha dog on a team where he can still put up numbers and build upon his brand would be to get traded to either New York or Miami, specifically Miami. In New York, he will basically become Carmelo Anthony 2.0. He will be the best player on a dysfunctional team/franchise with another young star alongside him. The best place where Irving can go is Miami. In Miami he will be the biggest name, the brightest attraction, get to play in a big media market, play on a young and improving team with one of the leagues brightest coaches in Erik Spoelstra, and most importantly…staying in the Eastern Conference where he can still win and only have to compete with Lebron and the Boston Celtics (and maybe the Washington Wizards). But even if he lands in Miami he still won’t realistically overthrow Lebron as the owner, operator, and dominator of the Eastern Conference.

As great as being “The Man” on your own team and having the franchise cater to your every need, it won’t benefit you more than playing alongside the best player in the world who makes every player he plays with better and works with you to be in the Finals every year. Maybe his numbers get better elsewhere and maybe he can be what Damian Lillard and John Wall are and thats the big fish in a little pond but Irving is better than both of them and is already on a team where he is a star and is a winning machine. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence and that is a lesson that Kyrie Irving is about to learn the hard way.

@e_campbell3

The Worlds Most Expensive Jerry Springer Episode: The Mayweather-McGregor Fight

With a little over a month until the biggest and most expensive boxing match since Mayweather-Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor have taken the traditional pre-fight, promotional press conference to a whole new trashy level. Now before I go any further, I firmly believe these traveling shit talking shows are highly glorified Jerry Springer episodes and really don’t do the fight any good in promoting it or getting many people who previously wouldn’t be interested in paying the absurd pay-per-view price to see it, to actually see it. The fight itself, is not expected to much of a fight at all, as McGregor is making his professional boxing debut against arguably the greatest boxer of all time and a boxer who owns an all-time record of 49-0. So of course, I figured the press conferences and all the pre-fight festivities would be the most entertaining aspects of this fight. But it could possibly be what turns many off and away from this event. The four day media tour that started on Tuesday in Los Angeles and concluded today in London evolved into an uncomfortable display of trash talking that according to Fox Sports’ Skip Bayless, has turned Mayweather into a sympathetic figure. That not only says a lot coming from the highly critical of everyone Skip Bayless, but the fact that anyone with the disturbing history of domestic violence that Floyd Mayweather has and an athlete with that bad of a negative reputation become a sympathetic figure going into this fight. McGregor crossed multiple lines with questionable comments in reference to asking Floyd to “dance for him” and his awkward comments that he was “half black bellow the belly button”. Not only could it be seen as offensive but it gives the audience and listeners the uncomfortable experience of second hand embarrassment.

But lets be real with ourselves for just a moment: what else did we honestly expect? Boxing pressers and interviews are vulgar in nature and have notoriously gotten violent in the past, from Mike Tyson claiming he would eat Lennox Lewis’ children after a fight against Lou Savarese to Iron Mike actually punching one of Lewis’ security guards during the press conference for the Tyson-Lewis bout in Memphis. These events aren’t meant to be baptist prayer meetings by any means and are not supposed to be classy. Boxing is a brutal sport that has diminished some of the worlds most physically dominant athletes and has even taken some lives in the process. But what these are not meant to be, is a display of racist or homophobic remarks or embarrassing Springer show-like antics. To me, this only shows that the fight is nothing but a money and attention grab.

The most unfortunate part of all of this is the fact that this fight will overshadow the main fight of the calendar year which is between two of the biggest names in the sport of boxing and that is the fight between Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin. Golovkin has yet to be beat as a professional and Alvarez is revered by many to be the best boxer in the world right now that is not named Floyd Mayweather. It will be a much closer boxing match than Mayweather and McGregor and will include two fighters that have everything to gain and everything to lose. But not many will care about the fight in comparison to the fight on August 26th. This a sign that the sport has died, that substance has been replaced by a traveling dog and pony show that will ultimately result in one of the more predictable outcomes in the sports history. And for boxing, it is a sign of how far the sport has fallen.