Perhaps no player in today’s NBA is criticized more by the media, loathed by more fan bases and yet so admired by his peers than Kyrie Irving.
Irving just endured a messy season; another spent as a lightning rod for criticism. Earlier this year, a season after holding out due to a refusal to get vaccinated, he was suspended for eight games by the Brooklyn Nets after tweeting the cover of an antisemitic movie and initially refusing to apologize. Then came his latest trade demand, resulting in the Nets sending him to the Dallas Mavericks at February’s deadline. After Irving joined the team, the Mavericks went 10-18 to plummet from fourth in the Western Conference standings to missing the playoffs altogether (Dallas was 8-12 in games Irving played).
The Dallas Morning News thus referred to Irving’s presence on the Mavericks as “the Kyrie Irving mess” and suggested that the team should wash its hands of a player who averaged 27.0 points on 51% shooting with a 3:1 assist-to-turnover ratio for the Mavs. Meanwhile, it took Dallas forward Maxi Kleber less than six weeks as Irving’s teammate to declare, “He’s a very, very great teammate. He always has positive spirits and uplifting words.” Despite the results, team owner Mark Cuban has said keeping Irving, a free agent, is the franchise’s top priority this summer.
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How can one player engender such disparate feelings? Ahead of NBA free agency opening Friday at 6 p.m. ET, FOX Sports spoke to Irving’s peers to find out.
While the eight-time All-Star has frequently sparred with reporters, and pledged his allegiance to fans only to ask for a trade or bolt via free agency, those who have competed with and against Irving describe a dedicated worker with a team-first attitude.
“I’ve been around a lot of All-Stars and he, by far, is my favorite,” said LA Clippers forward Marcus Morris Sr., who spent two seasons with Irving in Boston. The other All-Stars he’s played with include James Harden, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Julius Randle, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
“When you’re in the locker room with him every day, you know his heart is pure, you know where his mind is at [and] you know he wants to win,” Morris added. “He comes in and shows the work. It’s hard to talk bad about a guy who comes in every day and works hard.”
The results of that work ethic are readily visible whenever Irving is on the court. No one is born with his shot-making and ball-handling skills. Despite his checkered availability — he missed nearly as many games (140) as he played (141) for the Nets — the Mavericks traded Dorian Finney-Smith (their best defender), an unprotected future first-round pick and another starter in Spencer Dinwiddie for Irving, even though he is a pending free agent. He is also the architect of one of the league’s singular moments, a game-winning 3-pointer over Stephen Curry to complete the Cleveland Cavaliers’ comeback from a 3-1 deficit over the 73-9 Golden State Warriors to win the 2016 title.
Since that moment, though, he has made more headlines for what he has said and done off the court — including trade demands made to both the Cavs and this past February, the Nets.
“A lot of people think I’m a bad guy that don’t know me,” Morris said. “I’ve had people say that. He’s just in the spotlight and he’s speaking his truth. Sometimes it can be taken the wrong way or taken out of context. It’s just what he believes. Is he mischaracterized? For sure. You could say that about a lot of guys.”
Morris’ perspective is particularly striking in light of how their two seasons together in Boston (2017-19) went. In 2017-18, Irving sustained a late-season knee injury and, unfazed, the team nearly reached the NBA Finals without him, losing to the LeBron James-led Cavaliers in a seven-game Eastern Conference finals series. The next season, with Irving back, the Celtics won six fewer regular-season games and were knocked out in the second round of the playoffs by the same Milwaukee Bucks team they swept in the first round the year before.
Even worse, Irving, a pending free agent, went from saying at a preseason event for Celtics’ season-ticket holders, “If you guys will have me back, I plan on re-signing here” to bolting for the Nets to join forces with fellow free agent Kevin Durant. Having grown up nearby in New Jersey, Irving said upon signing with the Nets, “In my heart, I knew I always wanted to play at home.”
What might be viewed by the media and some fans as disingenuous at best, desertion at worst, was viewed by Toronto Raptors veteran forward Will Barton as Irving having to deal with the changing, fickle nature of life in the NBA.
“He was playing like an MVP candidate, goes down and those guys go to the Eastern Conference finals,” Barton said. “That was a very young team at the time, besides him. You know those [other] guys weren’t coming back saying, ‘Hey, I’ll take a backseat,’ like they did at first because they’d never had success. Then it was easy for them to say, ‘You’re my guy, Ky.’ But now, how are you going to tell Jayson Tatum, who everyone said after that year is a rising star, to dial it back? You want Jaylen Brown to dial it back? No, guys are not going to do that. Especially not young guys. There’s no dialing it back.
“That was the problem,” Barton continued. “And that didn’t make those guys bad or Kyrie bad. That’s a part of sports, life and basketball. But no one talks about that. I haven’t heard one media outlet talk about that. They always say Kyrie was a cancer. He broke the team. But nobody [on the team] said that.”
Former teammates Kyrie Irving and Jayson Tatum embrace after the Nets faced the Celtics in February. Irving went to Brooklyn in free agency after spending one season with the Celtics.
Irving has certainly been an agent for good. He served as a players union vice president and has made numerous charitable donations to causes both locally and globally. One of Irving’s former Nets teammates, Langston Galloway, started his own shoe company, Ethics, and Irving offered to wear them in a game as a gesture.
“It’s something small but him wearing them brings a lot of attention,” Warriors guard Donte DiVincenzo said. “He shows a lot of love to other guys in the league. He’s never one to say, ‘I’m better than X, Y and Z.’ It’s, ‘He’s a bad m—– f—–, I really love his game.’ He’ll give you your props and that’s not common in the NBA.”
But Irving’s also been an agent of chaos. And, while not all 12 of the players FOX Sports spoke to support the controversial stances that have resulted in fines and suspensions and missed games for Irving, they all respected his fearlessness in expressing them, regardless of the consequences.
“If you peel back the layers of every player in the NBA, I’m sure you’ll find some opinions that wouldn’t mesh with what the rest of the world wants to see,” said Raptors point guard Fred VanVleet, also a coveted free agent this offseason. “Now, Kyrie speaks on them more frequently than anybody else, but once we get deeper and deeper into what people think and feel about every little thing, you’ll find some friction there. I think that’s probably what it is with him.”
Whatever battles Irving might be fighting off-court, Morris said he has not let them impact his interaction with his teammates. That was the case in Brooklyn as well, according to Morris’ twin brother Markieff, who played alongside Irving in Brooklyn and was included in the trade to Dallas.
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“Me and Ky spent a lot of time together off the court, just talking and having conversations,” Marcus Morris said. “That’s different for me because I never really got close with a lot of players in the NBA. He’s from Jersey, and I’m from Philadelphia, so we crossed paths a few times in high school. It’s always been genuine. Sometimes we all have bad days, but he never let them get to him, he never brought them into the locker room. He never rubbed anybody the wrong way.”
That’s not entirely true. Philadelphia 76ers guard Harden, who spent parts of the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons with Irving in Brooklyn, indicated that he asked to be traded in part due to Irving’s chronic unavailability. And, Los Angeles Lakers point guard Dennis Schroder had an issue with Irving at one point as well, as the result of an altercation two years ago in a game in Brooklyn.
Schroder felt Irving was being unduly physical guarding him and Irving appeared upset when Schroder complained to the referees. At one point, they stood nose to nose and Schroder said, “C’mon, n—-!”
Irving shouted back, “You can’t say that! You’re from Germany!”
Schroder, born to a Gambian mother in Germany, was incensed. They continued barking at each other and were ejected.
“My first six, seven years I respected him so much because it didn’t matter if he’d bust your ass with a 40-point game or had a quiet game, he was always the same guy,” Schroder said. “Didn’t talk s—. Then we had that incident in Brooklyn, which surprised me because it was out of nothing. I was shocked. I’m not going to lie. I asked LeBron, ‘Why did he act like that?’ LeBron said, ‘I don’t know, just let it go.’”
Dennis Schroder said that Kyrie Irving apologized for an altercation between the two point guards two seasons ago in Brooklyn. “I respect him as a player and as a human,” said Schroder about Irving.
The two didn’t face each other again until this past February, when the Lakers visited Dallas. At one point during the game, coming out of a timeout, Schroder went to guard Irving as the Mavericks inbounded the ball. That’s when Irving said to him, “I want to apologize. We’ve been going at it for so many years, you know that’s not me.”
Schroder was touched by the apology.
“He said he was going through something at the time and that’s why he reacted like that,” Schroder said. “To say that, and you’re such a powerful player? That means everything. We swapped jerseys after that game. I’m right back on the same side I was the first six, seven, years. I respect him as a player and as a human.”
VanVleet suggested that Irving’s issue with the media — or maybe the media’s issue with Irving — is that he’s never been as forthcoming with his critics.
“He’s been in a lot of headlines the last few years,” VanVleet said. “He’s certainly made some mistakes, but that’s for him to deal with. Once you get caught up in that mainstream media wave, it’s a whirlwind. If you don’t climb your way out by doing or saying what they want you to do or say, the hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper. He rebelled a little bit against that.”
Schroder admires that stubbornness, especially in light of the millions of dollars in salary Irving forfeited through suspensions and the criticism he has endured.
“He’s staying true to himself and I love that,” said Schroder, who also balked at getting vaccinated.
“There’s not a lot of people like that. Because he’s a top-five or top-10 player, whatever you want to call him, to stay true to that, a lot of people in that position don’t do that. If you have something in your mind, money shouldn’t be the problem.
“I’m not saying he’s wrong or right, but what he thinks is right, he stayed true to it, and that’s what I respect.”
Ric Bucher is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. He previously wrote for Bleacher Report, ESPN The Magazine and The Washington Post and has written two books, “Rebound,” on NBA forward Brian Grant’s battle with young onset Parkinson’s, and “Yao: A Life In Two Worlds.” He also has a daily podcast, “On The Ball with Ric Bucher.” Follow him on Twitter @RicBucher.
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