The Brooklyn Nets have had quite the rollercoaster of a season and yet we’ve only just surpassed the halfway point of this 2022-23 campaign. Kyrie Irving has been the main story for the Nets this year given his run-ins with cancellation earlier on due to an antisemitic controversy and now with him leading the charge with Kevin Durant out.
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The first 4 games that the Nets played after KD went down with his MCL sprain all resulted in losses, with Kyrie shooting below 40% from the field on average in those bouts. However, these past 2 games have shown a side of Irving that fans are more accustomed to seeing.
He’s taken over on the offensive end of the floor with a lot of the offense running through him, leading to 2 straight victories. The first was when he dropped 48 points and now he’s had himself a 38-point night against the Golden State Warriors in a come-from-behind victory.
Kyrie Irving on being the 2nd or even 3rd option
Kyrie Irving has had to find a role for himself on the Brooklyn Nets ever since he’s joined the team. He started off as a 1A, 1B option next to Kevin Durant. However, when James Harden came on board, he relinquished point guards duties to ‘The Beard’ and ‘relegated’ himself to becoming a shooting guard.
Now, with the Nets back to having two superstar offensive options, Kyrie seems to be finding his place in the offense yet again. However, after tonight, he admits to having had it figured out as he simply doesn’t care about whether he’s the 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd option on the team.
Kyrie: “I told you guys that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to be the first option or the second option or the main one. This is just a message for everybody at home: 1st option, 2nd option, 3rd option, they don’t fu-king matter to me….The objective is to win” #Nets
— Brian Lewis (@NYPost_Lewis) January 23, 2023
One of the biggest misconceptions about Irving is the fact that he’s a selfish player when in reality he’s a man who can dish when he chooses to. The biggest play of the Warriors-Nets game saw him open up the floor for a Royce O’Neale dagger 3 after he failed to drain his own fadeaway mid-range.
Kyrie Irving will have to go at it ‘alone’ for some more time
Kevin Durant spraining his MCL yet again has led to him being out for at least another month. It has been about 2 weeks since the sprain against Jimmy Butler and Miami and so Irving will have to man the offense ‘by himself’ for another two weeks at the minimum.
In these past few games without KD, Irving has been averaging 31 points, 6.8 assists and 6.6 rebounds. Though, these numbers aren’t consistent as the sample size is 5 games and in one of these few games he dropped 48 points while in another he had merely 15.
