The unanimous reaction yesterday from basketball cognoscenti and idiot bloggers alike to Kyrie Irving's trade request was shock and bemusement. Inevitably, inevitably, right? today there are some Blame_Kyrie_on_James who say that Irving--Une momento, I want to get this quote just right.--that Irving "has become proactive in controlling his own career arc", that arc control is the legacy of LeBron James to players like Kyrie, "the best players on the planet," "the modern basketball superstar", those "open to big ideas and big visions...", those who aren't "chasing a market as much as an environment"; that with "a dozen-plus teams...in hot pursuit" Irving is already bending his career arc to His will and validating His "vision."
It becomes our disagreeable duty now to record that this alluring, dream-like, counter-narrating, swinging pendulum has not been grabbed by all hands, no not at all, that it was the instant and is the considered, enduring opinion of these non-dreamers, of these non-hallucinating humbugs, of those who construct mirthful memes, that if M Kyrie Irving is amongst those who are "the best players on the planet" the question "Which planet?" nags and begs; that to ascribe to M Irving LeBron James-like "vision" because Irving is "open to big ideas and big visions" like the earth being flat, it is the opinion of these better sorts that those are two incongruous types of vision, the one congruous with arc bending, the other perhaps congruous with correction by remedial education, perhaps with a lobotomy of the frontal lobes, that "blind as a bed bug" rather captures the type vision we ascribe to he who we have nicknamed Bed Bugs; that we read doubtfully--but with deference to our better--that there are "a dozen-plus" Dan Gilberts and James Dolans in unreasoning, breathless, wallet-opening "hot pursuit" of Bed Bugs even as we are mindful of the adage "a fool and his money are soon parted"; that be that as it may Devil Dan will find one fool at least for M Irving, that we can think of no more likely provider of the desired moolah, the "environment," the "big ideas and big visions," than garden caretaker Dolan, and that be that as it may wherever M Kyrie Irving lands he will disappear from memory into mockery and irrelevance as surely as if he fell off the face of the earth. Or stayed in Cleveland.
