NBA SHOULD FREEZE OUT KYRIE, LET HIM FALL OFF HIS FLAT EARTH

Rather than fix a hopeless malcontent, every league team — Lakers included — should resist any urge to pursue Irving and let him rot away as a free agent seeking a long-term max contract

     Here’s a blast of raw truth about sport’s most insufferable anti-vaccine dissident and Flat Earth conspiracist: Every NBA franchise, including the desperate Los Angeles Lakers and devastated Brooklyn Nets, should let Kyrie Irving rot away … forever. If he’s senseless enough to seek a long-term suitor for his egregiously unreliable services, all 30 owners should issue the same five-word directive to their front offices.

     Don’t even think about it.

     And three more words: Or you’re fired.

     If ever a star athlete should be blacklisted within a league, regardless of his massive talent, it’s Krazy Kyrie. He’s just delusional enough to think — after wrecking three teams in five years — that a fourth actually should covet him enough to grant him a max contract. Rewind the loopy loop from 2017-2022. He chose to leave LeBron James and request a trade, only a year after the Cavaliers won the impossible Cleveland championship, so he could be the alpha dog in Boston. His romance with the Celtics soon turned to F-bombs from fans who realized he was poison for a young team and coach. Then he formed a “superteam” with a gullible friend from way back, Kevin Durant, and together, they vowed to shame legions of haters with glory in a New York arena not named Madison Square Garden.

     All he did was start dumpster fires. All he did was quash hopes. All he did was sabotage hardware. All he did, in Durant’s case, was dilute if not end a friendship. All he did was force the executives who’d believed in him to change plans and curse him. And now, after missing 123 of 226 possible Nets games for reasons unacceptable to anyone involved in pro basketball for winning purposes, Irving believes he’s entitled to free-agency leverage?

     So he’s a scoring machine when he’s engaged. So he has the game’s best handle when he’s engaged. Who cares when he’s rarely engaged? Who cares when he has missed 41 percent of the games played by those three teams, in those five seasons, that paid him hundreds of millions of dollars to show up and wear a uniform?

     What team of sane mind and appropriate values would want him? And that includes the Lakers, who are better off sinking into Lotteryville than letting LeBron — and his short memory about Irving leaving Cleveland — talk them into bringing his act to a city with too many bad actors as it is. James can’t be that miserable, can he? After a lost season with Russell Westbrook, he wants to stoop even deeper into the drama cesspool?

     Krazy Kyrie had the gall Thursday to hijack the NBA Draft — at Barclays Center, of all places, the home building from which he was banned last season as an unvaccinated holdout amid New York City’s vaccine mandate. Hours before Paolo Banchero took his purple suit to Orlando and 7-footer Chet Holmgren took his 195 pounds (and barbells) to Oklahoma City, Irving dropped another unappetizing bomb when he planted a story through his agent to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. His agent also is his stepmother, Shetellia Riley Irving, who also is vice president of ad sales at BET, far from the league’s representation establishment. For that matter, perhaps James and Rich Paul — who help run the Lakers under the guise of Klutch Sports Group, their agency — are entering the picture and offering Kyrie (terrible) advice in hopes of landing Irving in L.A. It’s bad form, of course, for any player or team to heist attention from young men reaching their dreams while introduced with their parents on a national stage.

     Why would Irving care? He’s on Planet Oddball. He wanted it known he has a list. The world could stop spinning on its axis, because Kyrie has a list! Oh, wait, he insists the world is flat. If Irving and the Nets can’t agree to a multi-year contract by Wednesday’s deadline, and he signs a one-season opt-in at $36.9 million, he’ll says he’ll accept a sign-and-trade deal to the Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, New York Knicks, Miami Heat, Dallas Mavericks and Philadelphia 76ers. If he senselessly rejects the opt-in, he’ll become an unrestricted free agent. Never mind that most of those teams, including the Lakers and Heat, don’t have anywhere near the hard-cap space to accommodate a max deal of up to $248 million. The best the Lakers can offer at the moment: a $6 million taxpayer exemption. When you think about it, that’s about all the guy is worth given his headaches. But Irving, stubborn to the point of obstinacy about his principles, obviously won’t be taking a $30 million pay cut after losing $17 million in givebacks from games missed due to the vaccine mandate. Sure, the Lakers would love to ship away Westbrook, whose $47 million salary would fit the match criteria for Irving under the league’s trade guidelines. But why would the Nets, nutty as they are, acquire a malcontent to replace a malcontent?

     Unless … they’re sick of the dysfunction, including the addition and subtraction of James Harden and acquisition of Ben Simmons, another problem child who refuses to play. The Nets and Barclays Center lost close to $100 million last season. In that sense, what Irving should symbolize is not a way out for a needy team. He should symbolize why the superteam concept died in the NBA. The Nets and their misguided owner, Joe Tsai, thought they could buy their way to championships. Tsai and general manager Sean Marks never considered the erratic moods and mysterious absences of Irving — and, for that matter, those of Durant, whose injuries were real and crippling. They just assumed title parades would commence across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Then the Nets tripled down on the superteam sham, acquiring another problematic star in Harden. Did Tsai and Marks not notice when Irving and Durant said they didn’t need Steve Nash on the sideline?

     “I don’t really see us having a head coach,” Irving said of the Hall of Famer. “You know what I mean? KD could be a head coach. I could be a head coach.”

     “It’s a collaborative effort, I think, on our part,” Durant said.

     In the revealing end, it was the team once piggybacked by Durant, the Golden State Warriors, that proved it could win a championship after he fled. They were in a race to see who was more important than the other after the two titles they won together, but it turns out the Warriors’ system — with homegrown players developed over years, prioritizing cohesion and oneness — won out as Durant faded into May also-random. In fairness, he played only 58 of a scheduled 247 games with Irving. But he should have foreseen the bad Kyrie karma before blindly bolting the Warriors for the murky unknown. He made the mistake of leaving them. They recalibrated behind Steph Curry, waited for Klay Thompson to regain health, tolerated Draymond Green, acquired Andrew Wiggins, unearthed new pieces in Jordan Poole and Gary Payton II and placed James Wiseman and Jonathan Kuminga in an incubator. With four titles in eight years, they’re favored to win a fifth next year.

     Now Durant is dropping his own hints, telling The Athletic’s Shams Charania — again, hours before the Draft — that he’s “considering options with his future.” Keep in mind, amid the media dizziness, that Charania and Wojnarowski are news-breaking rivals years after Woj groomed Shams at Yahoo Sports. They have their own way of hijacking Draft Night, with Woj following up, “Kevin Durant has not told the Nets that if Kyrie Irving leaves, that means he’s going to ask for a trade.” It means nothing on June 23. By late next week, Durant could demand a deal.

     In that case, yes, the suitors would and should line up. With four years left on his contract, a renegotiation wouldn’t be necessary. Unlike Irving, teams would be willing to tear up rosters to accommodate Durant. Yet the Nets have the leverage in such a scenario and could demand the moon … and Beverly Hills and the Kardashians and a piece of the Pacific Ocean from the Lakers. Hell, LeBron and owner Jeanie Buss would ship away injury-prone Anthony Davis in a heartbeat and drive to Brooklyn in a van to pick up Durant.

     But first, Durant must make this known throughout the league: He is completely divorcing himself from All Things Kyrie. When they did find the time to suit up together in the playoffs, they lost 13 of 20 games. Not long ago, Irving said of his future, “I don’t really plan on going anywhere. I’m looking forward to the summer and just building with our guys here.”

     Just a few weeks later, he’s making a list. He’s not checking it twice. Kyrie may believe in Santa Claus, too, but if people in this league are thinking rationally and setting aside God complexes, there will be nothing under Irving’s tree.

     Ever again.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.