Kyrie Irving is one of the most skilled players in basketball history. Q-Rich compares his approach to working on his craft to Kobe Bryant’s methods.
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The 2021-22 NBA season has had a lot of things wrong with it. And for pure basketball fans, if there’s been one missing ingredient essential to our consumption of regular season basketball, it’s the absent Kyrie Irving.
For reasons of his own, which we will not get into here, Kyrie has been away from NBA courts. But you would be lying through your teeth if you said you don’t enjoy watching him play.
This man is absolutely a pure basketball genius. With a lot of players, there seems to be a very fixed arsenal that they use. Even most star players seem to have a favored spot, or a tendency they’re wont to display often.
That’s not the case at all with Kyrie. If you were a defender going into a game against a team led by him, there’s not much scouting you can do to try and negate him. This man has possibly the deepest scoring arsenal in the league today.
You might consider this sacrilege, but the likes of Andre Iguodala would definitely speak for me on this. He’s on that LeBron, KD level. And when he’s on, he’s able to bamboozle his defenders in every which way.
It’s very rare for Kyrie to have a 30-point game without a bunch of absolutely stomping highlights.
Kyrie Irving may have been away from basketball for a while, but his methodology is really freaky
One of the best approaches to training is to try and emulate high-stakes action during your reps. Kyrie Irving is definitely one of those players who swear by this, as Quentin Richardson pointed out in a recent Knuckleheads podcast:
“You (Kevin Durant and the Nets) guys were playing the Magic. I had to do the pre-broadcast for them. He (Kyrie Irving) was over in the gym, and he was working out with his 3 trainers there. I got footage of him (there). If you talk about his routine, it was on some Kobe s**t. All left-handed.”
Q-Rich proceeded to describe how Kyrie used only his left hand for the entirety of that training session. Kyrie Irving is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing layup artist in the league today. He uses all different sorts of finishes through traffic, and he practices every detail.
“He’s just sitting there and flipping himself the ball. He was doing so much janky (stuff) – floaters, Eurosteps, Euro the wrong way. And it was just finishes. All left, all left. Then he went and started doing some mid-range.”
“I was like ‘Imma show all this to my kids, bro!'”
