LeBron James, Kyrie Irving selfishly disrupting NBA Finals with preposterous Mavericks team-up rumors

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MIAMI — Leave it to Kyrie Iriving. Ruining basketball teams is no longer enough. Now, along with his buddy LeBron James, he’s doing his best to diminish this year’s NBA Finals, too.

On Wednesday, those two players may know, the Denver Nuggets and Miami Heat will play a crucial Game 3 of a championship series that’s currently knotted up at 1-1. This Finals, though intriguing, has not drawn the same kind of ratings as the two conference finals that preceded it, a fact the NBA would surely love to alter.

So it must be particularly galling that LeBron and Kyrie have somehow again found a way to suck much of the oxygen out of the room, forced the game’s spotlight to shine yet again in their direction, and generally aim to make this moment more about them than the NBA.

“This is what LeBron does,” one NBA source who’s worked with LeBron says. “He can’t help himself.”

Same for Kyrie.

The latest example is the report on Monday from The Athletic that Irving, an impending free agent, reached out to his former teammate to see if the James has any interest in joining him in Dallas.

This is preposterous for several reasons, not the least of which is the timing, smack in the middle of a series worth fans’ attention but not drawing it the way yet it should.

First, the Dallas Mavericks have nothing to offer the Lakers for an under-contract LeBron James — unless, having lost their collective minds, they wanted to send Luka Doncic west. 

Again: Preposterous stuff.

Devoid of players or picks Los Angeles would even remotely consider — and thus no path for the kind of sign-and-trade you’d need to likely make the numbers work under the new CBA — the only other path for this to happen would be the Lakers buying out LeBron James and allowing him to freely, with no return, head to Dallas.

A third time: This is preposterous stuff.

And yet Irving or James (or both) made sure this supposed private conversation made its way to a newsbreaker whose every utterance becomes the narrative.

Worth noting: James has made no secret of his desire to play…

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Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/lebron-james-kyrie-irving-selfishly-disrupting-nba-finals-with-preposterous-mavericks-team-up-rumors/

Author : Bill Reiter

Publish date : 2023-06-06 21:43:20

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