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The Kyrie Irving Conundrum

Kyrie Irving can be the most dangerous and exciting player in the NBA at any given moment. How that fits on a team built around structure and roles is a different question.
Image via Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

Never has the phrase good basketball—as uttered by coaches and various proxy-coaches, television analysts and sports bar theorists and the internet intelligentsia—meant as little, or meant it as nebulously, as it does in this moment. The advancement of our collective understanding of the game has outpaced our ability to agree to new standards, so we float towards this regular season's final stretch with splintered convictions. The Golden State Warriors, depending on your perspective, are an all-fronts juggernaut or the latest batch of jump-shooters ready to get their playoff comeuppance. The Atlanta Hawks are about to prove or disprove the notion that a title contender needs a leader in jersey sales. The Memphis Grizzlies, transported via stargate from the harder-core 1990s, are either obsolete or the only ones who know the real deal.

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The Cleveland Cavaliers, more than any other team, are a prism for contemporary basketball beliefs. They have been assembled almost entirely in the eight months since the mid-July morning when LeBron James announced his return; only one starter and two other rotation players remain from last season's version. In place of the departed slouches is a checklist of the modern team's needs: Timofey Mozgov provides cost-effective rim-protection, J.R. Smith some handy (and surprisingly tranquil) spot-up shooting. Though the reality has been awkward, Kevin Love fits this thesis, slotting in the imagination, at least, as an adaptable responder to James' varied modes of attack.

Read More: LeBron James And The Art Of Uncoolness

The most important of Cleveland's remnants, though, is also the player who least fits the team's tableau of functionality. Point guard Kyrie Irving is the single-minded soloist to James' bandleader, all tough fadeaways and antic drives. He is also playing his best basketball of the season as the Cavs are playing theirs, and further muddying the notion of what a contender is supposed to look like.

Last Thursday, Cleveland went to San Antonio and beat the Spurs in overtime, 128-125, in a spectacularly good game. Were it not for the famous reticence of one and Q-Score consciousness of the other, the back-and-forth between Kawhi Leonard and James would have suggested that each had said some really vile shit to the other just before the tip. Tony Parker and Tim Duncan, with their whirling drives and shoulder-dips, traced just about every cubic centimeter of space between foul line and rim. James and Irving made plays in neon.

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The game's last stretch, though, belonged almost solely to Irving. He scored 27 of his 57 points in the fourth quarter and overtime, with six coming on a pair of contested three-pointers in the final minute of regulation that saved Cleveland from what looked like a certain loss. He routinely and mercilessly spun his man with two or three or four crossovers in a row—each sold as the final one, with his shoulders dipping and his feet starting—and then darted past him and into the lane. He used screens the way a kid playing keep-away uses the kitchen table. Some of his sequences resembled slalom skiing more than anything from basketball: pinch between two defenders, Euro-step past a third, drop a layup just above the fingers of the fourth. If the court had been infinite and the defenders had kept coming, Irving could have dismissed them by the dozens.

"I was thinking I could…" "Yeah, dude, shoot it. I get it." Photo by Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

It was great fun to watch, the type of performance that turns a nice way to spend an evening into something seared in memory, but some part of it was unsettling. This had to do, maybe, with the obvious difficulty of the shots he took; even after a dozen of them had gone in, each fading triple or double-clutched layup seemed unlikely to fall. The fact that all this maneuvering came against San Antonio only amplified the implausibility. The Spurs moved and passed until something easy came; Irving made the tough stuff work out, and somehow his team won.

In recent weeks, Cleveland has increasingly come to resemble what many imagined before the season—James' post-Miami thesis, well-defined roles and selfless imaginations circling the hub of the generation's best player. But while Irving's monster game provided a little salvation, it also highlighted the dissonance between concept and reality. Thursday night's Cavs resembled nothing so much as the Heat of James' first season in Miami: flawed and brilliant, more turn-taking than meshed, often—but not always—able to outrun their own imperfections. The results since that game, a luxurious win over Orlando and a loss to James' old teammates in Miami in which Irving and James seemed unable to synchronize, have underlined the likeness.

That reading of Irving and his team leaves room for a falter and eventual growth, following the Miami model. Irving will learn to make quicker decisions and do more with fewer dribbles. He will develop some of the complementary off-the-ball acumen Dwyane Wade evinced over the past couple seasons and some of the inclusiveness that James was born with. He will talk to a reporter in a few years with confetti sticking to his shoulders and the Larry O'Brien trophy in his arms and say how much those playoff losses to more harmonious teams taught him.

There is another possibility, though, one in which Irving is already close to what Cleveland needs him to be. Here, the Cavaliers' principals run on parallel tracks, James maintaining the team's organization and tempo and Irving interjecting when match-ups and situations dictate. They burn through a tame Eastern Conference and win the Finals against whichever tired team makes it out of the West. And for a while, until next winter's reappraisal, good basketball means not liquid inclusion or ruggedness or roster depth and adaptability but pure, overwhelming talent, the kind that turns difficult moments into made shots and then turns those made shots, over and over, into wins.

Whatever way Cleveland goes this year, Irving demonstrates as well as anyone the difficulty in pinning down basketball propriety. Someone always comes along good enough, for a game or just for a while, to shake design out of its shoes.