ESPN slotted Kyrie Irving at No. 39 in its NBA Rank after he missed all of last season recovering from a torn ACL, and the Kyrie Irving NBA Rank placement says more about the calendar than about the player. A year off the floor is a long time in a league that forgets fast. Thirty-ninth is not an insult. It is a shrug with a number attached.
Here is what that ranking is actually measuring. Not the handle, which does not erode. Not the footwork in the mid-post, which is the most beautiful thing in the sport when it is working and is mostly a matter of feel. It is measuring the knee, and nobody on the outside gets to measure the knee. Voters see a guard on the wrong side of 30 coming off the most serious lower-body injury available and they price in doubt. That is the honest version of what happened here.
The context that matters for Dallas is that the Mavericks spent a whole season without the man who bailed them out of broken possessions. Irving has always been the late-clock insurance policy, the guy who turns a dead 4 seconds into two points because the defender guessed wrong on the third crossover. You cannot replace that with scheme. They tried.
Checked the almanac: Jamal Murray tore his ACL in April of 2021, missed the entire following season, came back, and by the spring of 2023 he was the second-best player on a championship team. It happens. It just does not happen on the timeline anyone wants, and the first months back are usually the ugly ones, the ones where the legs arrive before the lift does.
What comes next is the part I care about. Not the ranking. The first stretch of real games, and whether he is getting all the way to the rim or settling for the floater he can hit blindfolded. Watch the deceleration more than the acceleration, because that is where ACL guys tell on themselves. If he can plant and stop, everything else follows.
No. 39 is a placeholder. He gets to argue with it in October.