Kyrie Irving no longer wants questions about his future with Mavericks

Tim MacMahon: Mavs GM Nico Harrison on the Kyrie Irving trade: “I don’t see any risk at all. I actually see risk in not doing it.” -via Twitter @espn_macmahon / February 13, 2023

The people who love watching Irving play extend him a lot of sympathy. One longtime agent surmises that Irving is forever searching for the love of the mother he never knew: “Sometimes you do terrible things to test people, to see if they still love you. That’s all it is.” A front-office executive who knows him says it’s more basic: “This is a guy who is feeling things a lot, but he doesn’t understand why he’s feeling them. Then he finds an external reason for Why do I have so much angst and unhappiness?” -via New York Magazine / February 13, 2023

During postgame press conferences, Irving often comes off as curt, defensive, and bored, as if to make himself even less scrutable to what he calls the “pawns” in the media. But on Twitch, where Irving could ask big questions, rather than answer annoying ones, he was loose: doing voices, humming, giggling. One NBA source, who knows him from Irving’s unhappy two years as a Boston Celtic, described his general demeanor to me as “lost in the canyons of his own mind.” Well, here he was, leading us around the dark parts of the map. -via New York Magazine / February 13, 2023