While he’s finished among the top five a couple of times (2014-19), Irving’s best season by offensive RAPTOR - 2016-17, in which he recorded a plus-6.3 and sniffed a spot in the coveted 50-40-90 club - ranks as just the 29th-best per-possession offensive performance by a point guard since 2013-14 and the 37th-best overall, while his 2020-21 campaign (which saw him actually record that 50-40-90) ranks 38th and 54th, respectively. (After all, nobody has ever accused Kyrie of being a lockdown defender.) Even on offense, as you’ll notice from the table above, Irving has never consistently ascended to the league’s upper echelon during his professional career. Compare that to the oft-maligned defense of Warriors guard Stephen Curry, whom RAPTOR has seen as a net-positive defender in all but three years since 2013-14.īut while Irving’s defense has usually left something to be desired, it’s hardly the sole reason for this apparent disconnect between his reputation and observable impact on the game of basketball. It’s a credit to Irving’s improvement on that end that he no longer ranks among the very worst defenders in the league - his 2016-17 defensive performance ranks 13th-worst among the 652 qualifying guard-seasons since 2013-14 - but he still lags behind his peers in that regard. Though his defensive impact has trended upward with each successive season in Brooklyn, his numbers remain woefully below-average for a player of his caliber and position: Last season, Irving’s negative-0.9 defensive RAPTOR ranked 41st out of 72 point guards who played at least 1,000 regular-season minutes, and he’s been an above-average defender at his position in just one season of his 12-year career. Listed at 6-foot-2, 195 pounds, Irving has always been an easy target for opposing offenses to hunt, and he’s been a net-negative on that end for all but one year of his career during the player-tracking era. The most obvious culprit for Irving’s less-impressive-than-expected numbers here is his defense. *Irving did not reach the minutes threshold to qualify for the RAPTOR leaderboard, so these rankings are based off of his numbers in the minutes he did play. Regular-season RAPTOR metrics for Kyrie Irving by NBA season, 2013-14 to 2021-22, with rankings among qualified players Year For a player whose observable skill set has long confounded the advanced metrics, it’s fitting that RAPTOR sees Irving’s impact differently than the conventional wisdom does: On a per-possession basis, Irving has cracked the top 25 of FiveThirtyEight’s regular-season Total RAPTOR metric just once since arriving in Brooklyn for the 2019-20 season, and in his career he’s reached that benchmark fewer times (four) than he’s fallen outside of it (five). And watching Irving certainly leaves you dazzled: You’d be hard-pressed to find a more maddening cover on defense, equipped with an arsenal of how-did-he-think-of-that moves and the slipperiness to evade even the rangiest and most committed of stoppers.īut Irving’s status as the darling of basketball aesthetes everywhere has obscured his overall contributions to winning basketball - even in the rare cases when he’s on the floor. Contemporaries have often called him the most skilled player in the history of the NBA, with some going as far to say he ranks among the league’s 75 best players ever. Throughout Kyrie Irving’s many basketball hiatuses over the years - whether due to injuries, refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine or, most recently, suspension for promoting an anti-Semitic documentary - the mercurial star’s on-court brilliance has rarely been questioned. Even when Kyrie Irving plays, measuring his impact is not straightforward.
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