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The future, past and present Kyrie Irving
With an NBA championship already won, what will an gold medal mean for Kyrie Irving's career? David Banks/USA Today Sports Images

The future, past and present Kyrie Irving

The crossover was never uncool. It always kind of existed as this necessary tool for the game’s little men to create space against bigger opponents. It’s a defensive mechanism used to create offense. Its function, however, is always secondary to its elements of style. In today’s NBA, a functional team is more important than the inherent coolness of its individual parts. Ball movement is at a premium, outside shooting and generating shots at the rim, the free throw line or both. What was once a league dictated by the one over the many has become a league that only allows the many to find measurable success. The crossover had lost its swagger, the very reason it was beloved, to begin with – until now. And this is probably Kyrie Irving’s fault.

What’s interesting about the fluctuating value of the crossover is it's the ostensible fluctuating value systems of the NBA. For those following the league since the turn of the millennium, they can backtrack through each domino that fell leading to today’s culture of efficiency. Analytics shed light on pass and touch rates, player movement, and player usage. We know now who holds onto the ball, who moves it and who moves without it. With these metrics, we also know who is hurting his team by doing too much or too little of these things, why he’s hurting his team and how those things can be corrected. The ball always moved faster than the man, but now we had the data to prove it. No longer is there a need for a point guard to dribble around his defender in one-on-one situations when those lanes are created by borrowing elements from the Princeton, Triangle, and Horns. The crossover didn’t just lose its swagger, it lost its utility, it lost its function.

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Before he knocked down that cold-blooded dagger over the soul of the NBA’s reigning MVP in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, Irving was already having a pretty okay career. He began his tenure in Cleveland heralded as the city’s savior, the young savant who would bring Cleveland what LeBron James couldn’t do himself. With James in Miami, Irving took over a rather pathetic roster after being drafted 1st overall in 2011. The Cavaliers, with head coach Byron Scott at the helm, weren’t winning much, but Irving was winning over the city with style over function, with a crossover berthed out of endless fields of daffodils and chamomile and a glut of smooth finishes at the rim that would make George Gervin blush. He played with a retro game, retrofitted for a new era of hoops. Irving began making crossovers matter again, but on a team that didn’t matter at all.

What did matter was this sense of fun, a new sense of cool. The Cavs weren’t winning games, but Irving’s sole purpose during his early career was to kindle a light in the darkness left by the absence of James  — and he sparked that light with a quick back and forth with the basketball coupled with a pull-up jumper or a dulcet finish at the rim. Irving filled a void in Cleveland by reproducing what had been left in yesterday’s NBA. Irving’s existence served a purpose during his early years, but that purpose was not who he was to become, the ball player he is now.

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After two games, the USA’s Men’s Olympic Basketball Team is 2-0 and have won both games by an average of 50.5 points. China started and finished slowly while Venezuela played the USA to a draw at the end of the 1st quarter only to lose by 44 points. The team has been nothing short of dominant in their two games, and there’s nothing to suggest that they won’t continue to beat up on the world’s lesser teams and compete well against other powers. The team excels when they’re in tune defensively and work together on that end of the floor as well as any team USA has put on the floor since 2000 — and it makes sense with a trio of all-world wing defenders on the roster in Jimmy Butler, Paul George and Draymond Green. DeMarcus Cousins has gotten all of the starts, but DeAndre Jordan has been wonderful coming off the bench and serving as the team’s best help defender.

On the offensive end of the floor, the team is led by Kevin Durant, George, Butler and Carmelo Anthony, who just passed Michael Jordan in all-time international scoring. They move the ball relatively well in half court sets, but they truly shine in transition when they can let their athleticism do all of the grunt work. The team moves quickly on the break, everyone filling the necessary lanes — and with this team, even the bigs are out-running the competition. Jordan has proved his worth on both ends of the floor, serving as a punctuation mark at end-of-transition or set play alley oops. With all of the talent on the floor at any given time, it’s Irving who ties everything together.

Durant led all scorers in the USA opener against China, but it was Irving who not only got his own, getting loose for four consecutive 3-pointers, but was the catalyst to Durant’s 25-point outburst.

"I think when you get hot, you want to see your bench get excited for you,” Durant told reporters after the game. "I think that’s better than making the shot, to be honest, and to see my teammates getting excited for me, that’s what kept me going. So, after the first one, they just kept telling me to shoot the ball, and Kyrie was trying to come to me every time. I think that is better than making the shot, to be honest. So, the bench was great, and we played a good overall game."

Irving is shooting at a .625 clip from three and just a shade under 50 percent from the field while boasting a 4:1 assist-to-turnover ratio. While the shooting from three isn’t sustainable, his continuance as Team USA’s central nervous system will not subsist as they continue through group play and into the medal rounds. Team USA, naturally, is expected to come home with a gold medal, but it’s going to be Irving who turns a collection of great players into a great team.

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Coming out of college, we really didn’t know who Irving was supposed to be. Because of injury, he played very little at Duke. We never questioned his talent, but it’s nearly impossible to project how these things manifest — especially with limited game tape at the college level. None of those concerns remain. In his fifth year, Irving is a 3-time All-Star and NBA champion. James came back, but Irving was at his side delivering on a promise that was made on his behalf by the organization. Irving played second-fiddle to James during their title run, and he’ll continue to do so as long as they co-exist under the same roof. But Irving’s story is his alone to write.

While James’ is the human embodiment of today’s efficiency-driven league, Irving is his eternally readjusting what it means to be a contemporary point guard. Irving opposes the standard ideology that a player — especially a point guard — must embrace one true representation of self, but Irving’s being permeates myriad eras and schools of thought. He is the present, the past and the future all at once, and can be any of these things, or none of them on any given possession — and it’s his crossover that allows him to do this.

We’re in the midst of a golden era of point guards. You can find any combination of speed, strength, explosiveness, awareness, vision and/or shooting in any arena on any night in the NBA. Every team has a good point guard, but only a few have those who will not only be considered great but will be remembered for more than just playing basketball: They’ll be remembered for capturing the zeitgeist of a very particular time in the league’s history. Irving will not be one of those players as he doesn’t exactly fit the mold of the kind of point guard most NBA teams covet in the 2010s.

Irving will be remembered, though. Not just for hitting the biggest shot in the biggest moment of the biggest game in Cleveland history, but for standing alone as the proprietor the reemergence of a very specific kind of cool. The NBA has never lost its appeal to the youth, but it lost the meaning of the crossover, and Irving will be recognized for one of the smoothest we’ve ever seen or will see in the future.

Can you name every player on the 2015-16 Cleveland Cavaliers Finals-winning team?
SCORE:
0/15
TIME:
3:00
PG
Kyrie Irving
SF
LeBron James
C
Channing Frye
C
Timofey Mozgov
PF
Kevin Love
SG
Iman Shumpert
PG
Mo Williams
SF
Richard Jefferson
SF
James Jones
PG
Matthew Dellavedova
SG
J.R. Smith
C
Sasha Kaun
PF
Tristan Thompson
PG
Jordan McRae
SF
Dahntay Jones

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