Mark Cuban offered a blunt take on Kyrie Irving and Luka Doncic playing together this week.
Specifically, the Dallas Mavericks team owner defended the pairing and said that they actually have a ton of potential to play well together.
As far as Cuban is concerned, Doncic and Irving played together for less than 1,000 plays. Despite that, when they were on the floor together, they recorded a 60 percent net effective field goal rate.
“Lot of people don’t think it, you know,” he said.
“So when you look at last year, we had issues that had nothing to do with Kyrie or Luka playing together.”
Cuban didn’t stop there, though.
“And we just didn’t have a team that was committed to the roles, right?”
To be fair, a lot of the Mavericks’ issues from 2022 can be attributed to their poor defensive play. That coupled with Jason Kidd’s bizarre vendetta against one of his own players led to Dallas missing the playoffs altogether.
That said, even Irving admitted at certain points that last season he and Doncic didn’t have the best communication. How that will change in 2023-24 remains unclear.
Big picture, the Mavs disappointed a lot of people last season. They came in riding a lot of momentum fresh off a Western Conference Finals appearance.
Instead of repeating, they regressed badly.
Fortunately, Doncic is currently the skinniest he has ever been.
Quite the start to the college football season already for Florida. https://t.co/fAMVXKi6p1
— Game 7 (@game7__) August 31, 2023
And Irving, on the surface at least, seems to have bought into Dallas’ plan for the future.
Now it’s just a matter of all parties involved putting everything together.
Will Irving, Doncic and Cuban be able to get on the same page for the Mavs come next season? Time will tell.
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Jennifer Withers Hoey is a former Business Development Manager who transitioned to writing about sports. With valuable connections all over the West Coast, she has used those contacts to break some of the most interesting stories pertaining to the Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon Ducks, LA Lakers, LA Clippers, Seattle Supersonics (RIP), and more.
