Trade Kyrie - No

[A Mad Chinaman]

***IF*** maintaining Ham’s commitment to being a top defensive team

Kyrie Irving has been a defensive sieve
Regular-season RAPTOR metrics for Kyrie Irving by NBA season, 2013-14 to 2021-22, with rankings among qualified players

The most obvious culprit for Irving’s less-impressive-than-expected numbers here is his defense. Listed at 6-foot-2, 195 pounds, Irving has always been an easy target for opposing offenses to hunt, and he’s been a net-negative on that end for all but one year of his career during the player-tracking era. Though his defensive impact has trended upward with each successive season in Brooklyn, his numbers remain woefully below-average for a player of his caliber and position: Last season, Irving’s negative-0.9 defensive RAPTOR ranked 41st out of 72 point guards who played at least 1,000 regular-season minutes, and he’s been an above-average defender at his position in just one season of his 12-year career.

It’s a credit to Irving’s improvement on that end that he no longer ranks among the very worst defenders in the league — his 2016-17 defensive performance ranks 13th-worst among the 652 qualifying guard-seasons since 2013-14 — but he still lags behind his peers in that regard. Compare that to the oft-maligned defense of Warriors guard Stephen Curry, whom RAPTOR has seen as a net-positive defender in all but three years since 2013-14.

But while Irving’s defense has usually left something to be desired, it’s hardly the sole reason for this apparent disconnect between his reputation and observable impact on the game of basketball. (After all, nobody has ever accused Kyrie of being a lockdown defender.) Even on offense, as you’ll notice from the table above, Irving has never consistently ascended to the league’s upper echelon during his professional career.

While he’s finished among the top five a couple of times (2014-15 and 2018-19), Irving’s best season by offensive RAPTOR — 2016-17, in which he recorded a plus-6.3 and sniffed a spot in the coveted 50-40-90 club — ranks as just the 29th-best per-possession offensive performance by a point guard since 2013-14 and the 37th-best overall, while his 2020-21 campaign (which saw him actually record that 50-40-90) ranks 38th and 54th, respectively. Curry (seven times), Chris Paul (five), James Harden (five), Damian Lillard (four), Russell Westbrook (twice), Trae Young (twice), Kyle Lowry (once) and even Isaiah Thomas (once) all posted more impactful offensive seasons than Irving during this time period.

So why doesn’t Irving’s offensive effectiveness line up with what our eyes tell us? A big reason may lie in the divergence between Irving’s traditional numbers and his on-court impact. Take Player Efficiency Rating, for example, a per-minute metric that measures a player’s box score production, as opposed to on-off plus/minus, which measures how a player’s team does when he’s in the game versus not. Irving tends to perform better in PER than in on-off statistics

corollary, Irving’s assist rate isn't in the same ballpark of distributors like Harden and Paul, nor does he move off the ball like Curry. The very attributes that have drawn Kyrie comparisons to dribbling maestros like Rod Strickland1 and Allen Iverson may also be the ones that keep him from entering the realm of all-time offensive greats. As my colleague Jared Dubin wrote last spring, Irving’s ball-stopping tendencies on offense came to a head against the Boston Celtics during the 2022 playoffs, where his approach of seeking out contested shots against the rangy Boston defense helped stymie any rhythm Brooklyn was hoping to build.

As it stands, Irving is not the scorer or distributor who can supercharge a team past its glaring defensive deficiencies


https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/kyrie-irvings-stats-arent-worth-the-drama/?addata=espnww:nba:story

[unleasHell]

In before lock/merge.......
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“Always remember... Rumors are carried by haters, spread by fools, and accepted by idiots.”

[ThreePointBomber]

Advanced stats shouldn't be taken so seriously.
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The most important shot in basketball.

[LakerFan1987]

What do we have to lose?

[daytripper]

I personally don't believe that Kyrie even likes basketball.

Hard Pass.

Lakers need to do something but Kyrie isn't the answer.

[Halflife]

Love him. Wanted him in summer but imho he doesn’t want to play anymore.
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Kobe.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Clw9scopegx/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=