Cuban on Mavs Re-Signing Kyrie: 'He Knows It's Luka's Team'
An NBA team having multiple superstars on its roster is a great luxury to have, but it can only reach its full potential if each guy knows his place in the pecking order and is willing to do whatever it takes to win.
The Dallas Mavericks will go into next season having retained their superstar duo of Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving after successfully re-signing Irving to a three-year, $126 million contract early in free agency. Although many people in the national media want to push a doom-and-gloom narrative about Irving's future in Dallas, his growth and maturity since joining the Mavs has been overlooked.
"I think Kyrie is mature to the point now where he knows it's Luka's team," Mavs owner Mark Cuban said in a sit-down interview with NBA SiriusXM Radio during the Las Vegas Summer League. "Luka knows this [too]. He knows, and that's what's important, and he's willing to play more of a shooting guard role. When Luka is out, we have a point guard who can score and create for other guys, they're both players who make their teammates better, and we didn't have that before."
Before the Mavs acquired Irving before last season's trade deadline, things would typically fall apart on the court whenever Doncic would go to the bench to get a breather – especially after the team lost Jalen Brunson to the New York Knicks in free agency last summer. Now, though, Irving will be able to take some of that pressure off of Doncic.
"Once Luka went out we struggled, we struggled mightily, and Luka had to do too much we put a lot of pressure on Luka," Cuba said. "We did struggle defensively after the trade, but that was for a lot of reasons. It wasn't Luka or Kyrie, but offensively, you know, we had one of the top lineups, we were the top two or three in the NBA."
Cuban is right, as we saw glimpses of what the star tandem of Doncic and Irving could be in the last 20 games of last season. Unfortunately for the Mavs, they weren't able to get over the hump in many of those games due to untimely injuries and a lack of depth. After adding Grant Williams, Dereck Lively II, OMax Prosper, Seth Curry, Richaun Holmes and Dante Exum this summer, Dallas' star duo will have a better chance to reach its ceiling.
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