Brooklyn Nets record with Kyrie Irving: 4-7
Brooklyn Nets record without Kyrie irving: 9-3
I have a narrative here, and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if anyone is going to come in here and try to tell me that the Nets AREN’T better without Cryrie Virgin taking way too many shots and having way too much ball-time in general. Try as I might, I can’t deny Irving’s individual basketball talent. But I can deny the idea that his talent helps the Nets win games.
Perhaps I am being simple-minded when I look only at wins when trying to determine how good the Nets are when I could be looking at differences in points per possession or shooting efficiency or other semi-advanced metrics. But narratives are all about being simple-minded, and here’s the thing about wins: they’re all that matter. You can boop around with your calculators and spreadsheets and statisticals, but at the end of the day, NBA players and teams are judged by the almighty W, and Spencer Dinwiddie, not Irving, is the one leading his team to them right now.
So there.
Dinwiddie doesn’t even need to be able to make threes anymore. All of his buckets tonight, all 10 of them, were layups (fine, one of them was a floater). Still, 9 layups, you know where I’m going with this (I’ve beaten the term “LAMEups” to death but I’m gonna keep using it anyway), but these were actually the good kind of layups. Not the bad kind of layups. Nikola Jokic might be the most useless rim protector in the whole NBA; he was there for a lot of them, but Dinwiddie just slithered around with his long limbs and calmly deposited the ball into the hole.