I still remember my first basket on a 10-foot hoop.
That first bucket, an underhanded heave toward a rim dangling from a splintery plywood backboard which was nailed to a tree in my backyard and inexplicably spray painted some sort of mauve, felt like true love. It took all my five-year-old might to get that Power Rangers rubber ball up and over the rim and down through the red, white, and blue net. I ran from my backyard to my house, hands in the air and yelling more nonsense than 1970s-style Cavaliers wallpaper for my family's desktop computer, and never looked back.
It wasn't until this year, roughly 10 years later, that I actually attended my first NBA game. My girlfriend got me tickets to a 76ers game in Cleveland, which was directly in the middle of the polar vortex that hit America this winter. Fortunately, I was able to swap them to another blockbuster game: a late-January affair between the 8-33 Milwaukee Bucks and the 15-27 Cavs.
But I didn't care that I anticipated a 75-65 snoozefest because I was going to be gripping my seat from the excitement of my first actual NBA game, an event a decade in the making.
Most important, I was going to get to see my new favorite player: back-and-forth with Uncle Drew. He's on the cover of NBA Live '14. He's supposed to be one of the league's next elite players.
I just don't see it right now.
Kyrie: Year 1
Irving played his first season with the Cavs at age 19. He tallied 18.5 points on a true shooting percentage of 56.6% and 5.6 assists, very promising marks for a rookie point guard. He compares well to his historical peer group of 19-year-olds, too.
Since 2000, twenty 19 year olds recorded at least 1550 minutes in an NBA season. Irving played 1558 in his rookie year at age 19. Unsurprisingly, this group of players is comprised largely of early draft picks destined for heavy minutes in the league.
| 19 Year Olds | nERD | Rank (of 20) | nF Efficiency | Rank (of 20) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Davis | 4.8 | 1 | 2.0 | 1 |
| Dwight Howard | 3.6 | 2 | 1.0 | 3 |
| Thaddeus Young | 2.8 | 3 | 1.4 | 2 |
| Chris Bosh | 2.4 | 4 | 0.7 | 4 |
| Kyrie Irving | 1.5 | 5 | 0.6 | 5 |
| Carmelo Anthony | -1.7 | 9 | -0.4 | T-7 |
| Tony Parker | -2.3 | 11 | -0.8 | 10 |
| LeBron James | -4.4 | 17 | -1.1 | 13 |
| Kevin Durant | -7.1 | 19 | -2.0 | 18 |
(nERD is a metric we use at numberFire that's comparable to win shares. It identifies how many games over or under .500 a team would be with a given player on its roster. You can read about it more fully this game-winning drive against the Celtics in Boston, during his Rookie of the Year campaign. Thought to be the next big thing in the NBA and the hero Cleveland needed after LeBron left, Kyrie needed to sustain his level of play into his second year and avoid the vaunted sophomore slump.
Kyrie: Year 2
Kyrie did sustain his success, but the key word in that clause is "sustain."
Historical comparisons are more plentiful for Irving's second season because he started at such a young age. Kyrie played 2,048 minutes in his second season. While this is roughly a 25% increase in minutes, nearly twice as many 20-year-olds saw at least 2040 minutes (39) than 19-year-olds saw 1,550 minutes (20):
| 20 Year Olds | nERD | Rank (of 39) | nF Efficiency | Rank (of 39) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeBron James | 15.6 | 1 | 3.6 | 1 |
| Chris Paul | 8.4 | 2 | 2.3 | 3 |
| Kevin Durant | 4.9 | 4 | 1.3 | T-4 |
| Dwight Howard | 4.3 | 5 | 1.1 | 7 |
| Tony Parker | 3.7 | 7 | 1.0 | 8 |
| Tracy McGrady | 2.7 | 9 | 0.9 | 9 |
| Kevin Love | 1.9 | 11 | 0.7 | 10 |
| Kyrie Irving | 1.1 | 16 | 0.4 | T-14 |
| Thaddeus Young | 0.8 | 17 | 0.3 | 17 |
| Chris Bosh | 0.5 | 19 | 0.1 | 19 |
| Carmelo Anthony | -1.8 | 22 | -0.5 | 23 |
| Derrick Rose | -3.1 | 27 | -0.8 | 24 |
| John Wall | -6.7 | 33 | -2.0 | 32 |
| Russell Westbrook | -8.5 | 37 | -2.5 | 35 |
The average nERD from this 39-player group is also negative: -0.86. Again, this indicates that, on average, playing a 20-year-old 2,040 or more minutes is detrimental to an NBA team. Not with Irving, who posted a positive nERD of 1.1. However, like I said before, Irving basically sustained his nERD (it dropped by 0.4). He didn't make a leap forward by a long shot.
For comparison's sake, that he's "excited" about it). But Irving wasn't consulted about firing head coach Mike Brown, and it's uncertain what role he'll play in deciding the new coach for the Cavs. Even still, it's unlikely the Cavaliers won't throw out the maximum five-year deal to keep Kyrie in the wine and gold; it's less likely that Irving will turn down a contract that huge.
The Cavaliers, still, are in desperate need of restructuring the roster and finding a head coach who can help Irving reach his full potential and make a leap like Curry or Rose did. Then again, it's possible Irving can't quite make that leap and nobody knows it yet. After all, there are plenty of names I left off the charts. No Cavs fan wants to include Kyrie's potential in the same sentence with Rudy Gay's, Monta Ellis', or Josh Smith's, right?
Right now, he's on the decline while other stars pass him by, even if the All-Star votes and YouTube views don't show it. His decline could be because of coaching, his teammates, or Cleveland itself, but he needs to figure it out before locking himself into another six seasons as a Cavalier.
As a Cavaliers fan, I want to see him stay and succeed and reach his full potential in Quicken Loans Arena and maybe turn that All-Star Game MVP into a Finals MVP.
As a Kyrie fan and an analytics fan, it bemoans me to think his best course of action is to take his talents to another franchise where he might be able to make that D-Rose or Curry leap into elite production.