Kyrie Irving And Kristaps Porzingis Had To Fail With Their NBA Finals Opponent To Get To Where They Are Today

The Boston Celtics held an event for fans at TD Garden on Oct. 4, 2018. At the time, Boston was the most exciting young team in the Eastern Conference, coming off a conference finals appearance that helped cement them as the next team in line if LeBron James ever decided to do something crazy, like join the Los Angeles Lakers in free agency.

While Kyrie Irving couldn’t play during that run — which ended with a Game 7 loss at home to James and the Cleveland Cavaliers — due to a knee injury, the All-Star guard was one of the stars on that Celtics team — the guy Danny Ainge acquired in a trade with the Cavs the previous year to get them another championship. And in a moment in front of Boston’s fans, Irving decided to express his intention to re-sign with the team instead of entering free agency the next summer.

And then, Irving never signed a deal, and things deteriorated over what became his final year with the Celtics. You can pick from any number of moments where the vibes were just completely off, from the time Irving admitted that he called James and apologized for not realizing how hard being a leader is, to any of the comments to the media where Irving was just a little too blunt about, well, everything.

“It was just a chapter in my life that I got to enjoy for the most part,” Irving told the media this week, per Tim MacMahon of ESPN. “We had a great opportunity to do some special things, but it was cut short, just based off personal reasons on my end. One thing I look back on my time in Boston — I’ve said this over the past few years, but somehow it gets tossed under the rug — but the greatest thing I learned from Boston was just being able to manage not only my emotions or just what’s going on on a day-to-day basis of being a leader of a team or being one of the leaders, and having young guys around you that have their own goals, but you have to learn how to put the big picture first.”

When free agency rolled around at the end of June in 2019, he decided to team up with Kevin Durant as a member of the Brooklyn Nets. It sent a shockwave throughout the league, largely because while the rumblings of Durant and Irving teaming up in the Big Apple weren’t new, the expectation was that they’d head to Madison Square Garden and join the New York Knicks, instead.

It was quite the blow for the Knicks, which had just seen one of its hopeful building blocks leave town. Six months earlier, New York made the decision to trade Kristaps Porzingis to the Dallas Mavericks and end his tenure in New York after three and a half years — reports indicated that a meeting between Porzingis and the Knicks led the team to believe he wanted a trade, as he had concerns about the direction of the franchise. What started as a promising marriage between a team desperate to get over the hump and a lottery pick whose skillset got him nicknamed “The Unicorn” devolved, and the Mavs were there to take advantage.

Before he ever got to play a game in a Dallas uniform, the team gave Porzingis a lucrative 5-year contract extension, as they finally got the running mate that would help Luka Doncic go from a budding superstar to an MVP with an All-Star sidekick. Or so they thought.

The entire Dallas experiment fell apart — what once looked like a hand-in-glove fit between a genius offensive engine and the perfect modern day big man eventually turned into Porzingis getting excoriated by his coach for how bad he was at posting up and, eventually, getting benched in the playoffs. Porzingis had his own hand in how things failed in Dallas, as there were rumblings of his frustration with his role, and he spoke about his experience in Dallas this year on the “The Old Man and the Three” podcast.

“It’s a big mix of things,” Porzingis said. “Maturity, for sure. Again, I’m talking about what I could have done better. And then, I wasn’t that much into analytics and numbers. If somebody, I think, at that stage of my career presented it to me the right way and said, ‘This is what we need to do, this is what we need from you, you’re gonna be way more effective doing this.’ Like, kinda explaining to me better. I think that would have made the difference, a little bit.”

While Doncic stressed this week that he has a good relationship with Porzingis now, Porzingis told Redick that their relationship wasn’t the best early on — “I think we both tried to make it work,” he said. “I think communication — maturity, communication on both of our parts — should have been better.”

Fast-forward to today and Irving and Porzingis are two indispensable pieces of teams that are four wins away from winning a championship. And the thing standing in their respective ways are the teams that brought them on board with title aspirations, only for both to fail spectacularly. Those experiences, along with continued struggles in their pit stops in between Boston and Dallas, have given both players the necessary perspective to adapt their games to the needs of their team and become exactly what the Celtics and Mavs have needed to reach the NBA Finals.

Irving, of course, joined Durant in Brooklyn after leaving Boston. James Harden then came to town, forming a superteam by any definition of the word. When they all played together, they were magnificent … only they very rarely got that chance, with Irving at the center of their instability. Whether it was due to his refusal to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the way he conducted himself in the aftermath of sharing a link to an antisemitic film on his Twitter account, or injuries, Irving was just not available enough, and usually for reasons that were wholly preventable on his part. He requested a trade in 2023, which led to Dallas getting him at the deadline for what is, in retrospect, pennies on the dollar.

Porzingis, meanwhile, essentially got salary dumped by the Mavs, as he got sent to Washington with a protected second-round pick for Spencer Dinwiddie and Davis Bertans. He was a nice player for a year and a half on a team that slogged its way to 35 wins in back-to-back seasons before the Celtics — in a series of events I still cannot wrap my head around — managed to acquire him in a three-team trade where they also received multiple first-round picks. One of those picks, a top-4 protected 2024 selection from the Golden State Warriors, was put in the package that was sent to Portland in exchange for Jrue Holiday.

Those past failures were crucial in shaping the guys that both of those teams got. Dallas did not trade for the Kyrie Irving who showed up in Boston, the one who wanted to get out of the shadow of being James’ sidekick and show that he could be the man. Instead, they got a guy who saw first-hand what all goes into being one of the leaders of a team. You hear it now in how people around the Mavs talk about Irving taking on the role of being a unifier, and how he’s playing off of Doncic instead of trying to be the man in Dallas.

Boston did not trade for the Kristaps Porzingis who got salary dumped to basketball purgatory and spent 82 games licking his wounds from a mega-trade gone wrong. Whether that meant getting better at posting up opposing defenders (he is now the league’s top post-up player, a far cry from when Rick Carlisle tore into him in front of the media and brought stats to back up his case) or being someone who accepts a smaller role that has a big impact on winning, Porzingis has figured out the “be a star in your role” lesson that many players need to figure out before they can become the best version of themselves.

Neither Irving nor Porzingis were good enough as a high-profile trade acquisition for teams that viewed them as a potential cornerstone for their franchise. And that happens. There have been countless athletes over the years who found themselves in that situation. But the important thing is to understand why you failed and how to learn and grow from that.

Both Porzingis and Irving have done that. Their teammates rave about their leadership and their calming influence, a far cry from their more mercurial younger days. On the court, they embrace and thrive in roles they once shunned. Irving, back where he started as the second star providing a change of pace and extra scoring and creative punch next to a generational superstar. Porzingis, now willing to accept his place on the totem pole behind Boston’s 1A and 1B, providing them with whatever they need on any given night, whether that’s three-point shooting or post scoring, and anchoring the defense at the other end.

As a result, their current teams are four wins away from a ring … with only their exes standing in their ways.