There’s something about scrolling back in time and landing on the moments before a landscape-altering act that’s absolutely thrilling. Maybe it’s the ignorance of the parties set to be involved, yet unaware of the monumental thing they’re about to take part in. There’s something mystical about it, to know a secret about powerful people not yet at the height of their powers, to watch them operate just before the thing that will come to define them.
They don’t know what they’re about to do or the implications it will have on their lives. But it’s coming.
That’s what it’s like looking back at the 2014 NBA All-Star Game. On a 62 degree night in New Orleans, a handful of the occupants of the Smoothie King Center were gearing up for major changes. Steve Kerr, calling the game as a color analyst for TNT, would be named the head coach of the Golden State Warriors a few months later, heading an offensive revolution that would net the Warriors three titles and counting. Steph Curry and Kevin Durant, eventual pupils of Kerr’s, both donned the bright red uniforms of the Western Conference, blissfully unaware that they’d be joining forces to send fissures through the NBA in just a couple of years. But it was a connection between two men representing the East where something more immediate was brewing.
Kyrie Irving, making his second all-star appearance, earned MVP honors that night, pouring in 31 points and postmarking 14 assists in a coming out party of sorts for the Cavs young point guard. His teammate, Miami Heat forward LeBron James, was the beneficiary of five of those dimes, including one where Irving knifed through the lane with his customary wizardry, spotted LeBron cutting in from behind him and hit him with a no-look bounce pass. LeBron crushed it home with a tomahawk dunk.
ah, All-Star memories pic.twitter.com/022tWvLdbT
— Jordan Zirm (@JordanZirm) February 13, 2019
Most of Irving and James’ connections in the Big Easy that night happened like that; Irving probing the lane with his otherworldly handles, then LeBron speeding in behind him at 100 miles per hour while an already dulled-down defense was lulled to sleep. In a game that’s customarily meaningless, there was purpose in how Irving and James played off each other, a certain joy that echoed through the Smoothie King Center. There was an undeniable synchronicity between the two, a connection that should not exist after only a few days of practice that’s more an exhibition for the fans anything else.
Frank Vogel, who was coaching the Eastern Conference that year, even drew up a play for Irving and James out of a timeout at one point, and it worked to a T. Reggie Miller, who was also on the call for TNT that night, pointed out that the entire Western coaching staff was laughing, because calling actual plays simply does not happen during the All-Star Game.
Even during possessions in which Irving took the offense into his own hands, there was LeBron, gazing from wherever he was on the court, always watching.
In February of 2014, the volume about a potential LeBron exit from Miami and return to Cleveland wasn’t much more than NPR on a Sunday morning level, but it was there. The molten lava that had formed between Cavs owner Dan Gilbert and James after his initial departure in 2010 had cooled and hardened, and James had the ability to opt out of his contract with the Heat at the end of the year. With no disrespect to Mo Williams and Mario Chalmers, James had never played with a point guard the caliber of Irving, and spent much of the lead up to that All-Star Game praising the kid who’d become the face of the Cavs franchise in his absence.
“I think he’s great. I don’t see him take a night off. You’re going to have bad shooting nights, but he’s doing great things,” James said. “I said it earlier this year or last year that in a couple years, he’d be [one of the] top two or top three best point guards in the league. He’s headed there already. His ability to shoot the ball, his ability to drive the ball and finish, I think he’s one of the best finishers we have in our game.”
The rumblings were tangible enough that Irving was asked about the fantasy of James returning to Cleveland after the game.
“My focus level is just on my team and our team that we have now,” Irving told reporters at the time . “That’s the most important thing at this point for me — just how I can get myself better anyhow I can make my teammates better every single day.”
The parallels between the two players’ careers were eerily aligned that night. James became an All-Star for the first time in his second season. So did Irving. James won his first All-Star MVP in his third season in the NBA. Now, so had Irving. Even when the game was finished, James continued to dote on Irving, urging him to hold the MVP trophy up above his head when Irving was initially too bashful to do so.
“I just wanted him to have his moment, and the moment is holding that trophy about your head,” James said.
The next time the two players were involved in the hoisting of a trophy would be on the floor of Oracle Arena in Oakland two years later, the Larry O’Brien trophy confetti-covered and gleaming in their hands after a historic comeback against the Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals. They were actual teammates now, not just mutual admirers at an All-Star game, the two former Cavaliers no. 1 draft picks both donning that “C” on their chest at the same time.
Their partnership would be brief, but that Sunday evening in New Orleans planted a seed. That seed grew upward and outward like the fleur de lis sewn into the chest of their jerseys, and ended with a championship. Whether Irving and James ever reunite remains to be seen (the freeze that led Irving to request a trade out of Cleveland and away from James looks to have thawed), but it’s fun to look back at the moment their eventual coexistence became more than just a fantastical idea.
