YouTube Gold: Watch Kyrie Irving Burn Defenders Repeatedly

No one does it quite like Kyrie

When you get past all the weird controversies, all the things that happened with the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Boston Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets, and you step back and you know what?

Former Blue Devil Kyrie Irving is, undeniably, a great, great basketball talent.

That’s not to excuse the occasionally strange things he’s said or endorsed, but the reality is that he’s legitimately a Hall of Fame talent as you’ll see in this clip.

It’s amazing, in retrospect, that before he was drafted in the 2011 NBA Draft, some people were not sure he was athletic enough.

He may not be the most athletic guard strictly speaking, but his quickness with the ball is unparalleled. Watch as he over and over again knocks great athletes off balance and then gets an uncontested shot.

Also worth noting: he has another brilliant talent, and that’s the ability to loft the ball over a taller defender when that defender is between him and the basket. That’s not an easy thing to do at all, particularly with a finger roll. It goes from maybe a 6” finger roll uncontested to an 18-22” finger roll with someone in your face.

That’s an example of another brilliant and under appreciated talent of Irving: spatial perception.

His forays into pseudo-intellectual foolishness may delay his entry into the Hall, but nothing can keep him out. He is in many respects a basketball revolutionary.

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