Kyrie Irving is an artist with a basketball in his hands. There is no doubt about it.
He’s that rare kind of ball-handler that leaves even the rest of the top-.5% of elite maestros of the craft baffled.
Because, let’s face it, Luka Dončić is also a basketball magician of the highest order, leaving puzzled defenders in his wake if not in his dust, with a level of trickery and sleight of hand second to none.
Well, almost none.
Dončić went on the “First We Feast” YouTube channel for a Hot Ones interview,
which was released on Thursday, and after his fourth chicken wing taste test, was asked by host Sean Evans about Irving’s handles, “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen Kyrie Irving do with a basketball?”
“When you think you’ve stopped him, he always finds a way to get to the basket,” Dončić said. “The ball-handling — you can’t learn that. He tried to teach me a little bit, but you can’t do it. The things he do — you can’t.”
And that’s coming from a man who wields the power to do pretty much whatever he wants with a basketball — a man who turns every bit of defensive leverage you think you’ve gained against him to his own advantage.
There are compliments — and then there’s Irving’s ability to leave one of less than 10 people on the planet able to manufacture two points from every nook and cranny on the floor in a state of amazement.
That’s what Kyrie Irving does.
“Hot Ones” is the series that bills itself as “the show with hot questions and even hotter wings,” where celebrities and chefs face a battery of interview softballs while chowing down on 10 wings basted in sauces that are progressively hotter and hotter on the Scoville scale. Dončić first needed the aid of the glass of milk in front of him when he tried the seventh of the 10 wings, this one glazed in something called Hawaiian Hot T’s POG sauce, which measures in at 110,000 on the Scoville scale.
In a feature for ESPN.com, Boston Celtics radio play-by-play announcer Sean Grande compared Irving’s quick-twitch decision-making with the ball in his hands to a street-side shell game card trick.
“The only thing I can compare it to is that shell game that they run on the JumboTron,” Grande told ESPN. “At first it’s going really slow — and then it just starts going super fast, and you just have to make a decision.”
Irving has in the last five years or so gained a reputation as one of the best ball-handlers of all time. The question, “Is he the greatest?” gets asked almost monthly in every corner of the internet content machine, and more often during basketball season.
It’s just too damn bad that those handles wont be on exhibit for most of 2025-26.
