Put the Mavericks aside: Kyrie Irving’s season-ending injury is devastating news

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The news of Kyrie Irving’s ACL injury sent shock waves around the league and apparently sits as another shot across the bow to Dallas Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison as another ripple from trading Luka Dončić a month ago.

It’s easy to frame this as cosmic or karmic to the Mavericks organization, as if Irving was some mere tool in the quest to make Harrison look like an incompetent fool for trading Dončić. But then you’d be selling Irving short, stripping him of the very humanity he has long claimed the media does on every possible occasion.

When Irving took a bad step down the lane of Monday night’s game against the Sacramento Kings, it looked bad and felt worse upon replay. Still, he took his free throws before being helped to the locker room by another injured teammate, Anthony Davis.

Those two have become unwitting weapons in the case of the People v. Harrison, apparently, since Davis suffered an injury in his Mavericks debut and now Irving will be out for an extended period of time, with surgery and a long rehabilitation process ahead.

To call this anything other than bad luck seems pretty mean-spirited, considering Davis had his healthiest season as a pro last year and had missed only five games this season before being traded — on pace for another 70-plus games played season. Irving had been playing heavier minutes with a bigger load since Dončić was traded, but those minutes had increased in the time Dončić was inactive after his Christmas Day injury (37.5 MPG between Dec. 27 and Jan. 31).

Wait, this isn’t just bad luck, it’s the worst-case scenario in every situation, as if the Mavs had snake eyes on every roll.

The focus here should be on Irving himself, one of the league’s most spellbinding figures, if not the biggest enigma from the last few seasons. He is as entertaining an athlete as the league has at his size and doesn’t sacrifice creativity for efficiency — he was still shooting over 40 percent from 3, 50 percent from 2 and 90 percent from the free-throw line. The Clippers’ Amir Coffey and Boston’s Sam Hauser are the only other regular rotation players with that…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/put-the-mavericks-aside-kyrie-irvings-season-ending-injury-is-devastating-news-211315347.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2025-03-04 21:13:00

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