Kyrie Irving is a tremendous offensive player. Or, at least he was before tearing his ACL and missing his entire age-33 season. The Dallas Mavericks may be right in assuming he’ll retain that status upon his return, and they should like the idea of him lightening Cooper Flagg’s offensive load.<\/p>\n
But what if the Mavs are wrong about Irving? What if trading him this summer, when there are questions about his value, is actually a much better decision than waiting until he returns and proves he’s not the same guy?<\/p>\n
Think about it. Several teams that exited the playoffs earlier than they wanted to could use a title-tested, high-end creator. The Minnesota Timberwolves, Detroit Pistons, Toronto Raptors, Atlanta Hawks, Orlando Magic, Miami Heat, Houston Rockets, Portland Trail Blazers and a host of others should be willing to swing a deal for Irving this offseason.<\/p>\n
If he appears hobbled or otherwise lessened by age and injury during the year, return packages will only get worse. The element of uncertainty, of Irving’s expected production, is a positive for his trade value right now. It may not be that way for long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyrie Irving is a tremendous offensive player. Or, at least he was before tearing his ACL and missing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":716988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-716987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/716988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}