So, Cavaliers standout point guard Kyrie Irving – one of the top players in the game — apparently wants to be traded?
So, going to the NBA Finals three years in a row, and with a fourth one almost guaranteed next season unless something incredibly unforeseen happens, and having hit the winning shot in Game 7 to secure a title in 2016 that broke Cleveland’s 52-year major pro sports league championship drought, doesn’t seem to be enough for him?
So, he wants to go someplace – even if it might be no place when it comes to competing for simply a playoff spot, let alone a berth in the Finals or even a championship – where he can be the man and doesn’t have to play second fiddle to perhaps the greatest player of all-time in LeBron James?
So, he’s more interested in his own personal gratification than that of the team – than that of being with a winner?
Understanding all that, then, the Cavs have to trade him. They have no choice.
If a guy doesn’t want to be here, or anywhere, then that team has to deal him ASAP. Bringing him back would be a disaster. Wow, talk about a distraction! An earthquake happening in Cleveland during a game next season would be less of a distraction than having to deal with an unhappy superstar every day. The dysfunction would consume the Cavs.
It’s like when a significant other tells his/her partner he/she doesn’t want to stick around. Trying to talk that person into staying is a waste of time. If her/his heart isn’t it, then there’s nothing – absolutely, positively nothing — that will change that.
Everybody has to make decisions about what they want and don’t want, and what they like and don’t like, both personally and professionally. Irving has made his decision, and the Cavs – and their fans – have to move on. It’s as simple as that.
Hopefully the Cavs will get a lot in return in the trade. If so, then that will be a whole heckuva lot more than the Browns got on two different occasions in their history when two of their greatest players valued personal gain more than team success.
That would be nothing. Again, absolutely nothing.
You mean this type of thing has happened before? You mean the situation with Irving is not a first?
Really?!
Yes, that’s true. It’s not even close to being a first, even in Cleveland.
Following the 1952 season, after being a key player on a Browns team that had gone to seven straight league championship games, with five titles, and would get to three more league championship games, with two more crowns, the next three years, wide receiver Mac Speedie gave it all up by bolting to the Canadian Football League near the end of his career so he could get paid big one last time. Speedie would have made the Pro Football Hall of Fame had he stayed instead of being just a Cleveland Browns Legend, and the Browns might have won it all in 1953 instead of losing to the Detroit Lions in the NFL title game.
Also, did I mention that Speedie was coming off a season in which he had led the NFL with a then franchise-record 62 receptions?
And following the 1983 season, quarterback Brian Sipe bolted to the United States Football League near the end of his career so he could be paid big one last time. This was just days after he had led the Browns to within a whisker of gaining a playoff berth. The Browns had made the playoffs in 1982, and two years before that, in 1980, Sipe had put the Kardiac Kids onto his shoulders and took them to the AFC Central Division crown for the first time in nine seasons. For that, he was named the NFL MVP, the first Brown to be so honored in 15 years, and the last Brown to have won it.
Yet all of that wasn’t good enough for Sipe, just like it had not been good enough for Speedie three decades earlier.
We need to be consistent here. No one criticized Brian Sipe or Mac Speedie for what they did, at the time that it happened or since, so let’s not be too harsh on Kyrie Irving for doing the same thing – that is, doing what he wants to do.
Indeed, the more things change, whether it be in football or life, or both at the same time, as it were in all three of these cases, the more they stay the same.
