Training Camp is officially here for the Dallas Mavericks, and with it comes a whole new batch of quotes and breakdowns from what was said on Media Day. On Monday, both head coach Jason Kidd and star guard Kyrie Irving took to the podium to do what the organization should have been doing for months now: Tempering the expectations that surround Kyrie Irving this season.
As
we all know, Irving is recovering from the torn ACL that he suffered back on March 3rd in a home game against the Sacramento Kings. The recovery time for an injury such as this typically is around nine to twelve months, give or take a bit. That is not the issue at hand here, however. The issue that has arisen is that, as Jason Kidd noted Monday in his presser, were reports of Kyrie being ahead of schedule in his rehab, which Kidd called “bad reporting”. The “reporting” was from his own General Manager’s mouth at NBA Summer League, but that’s neither here nor there. Irving himself noted that he was “right on schedule” and spoke at length about not wanting to put a timetable out there, since there would then be pressure on him to hit said timeline.
This gets back to a larger issue at hand amongst many circles of Maverick fans, both in the online and offline discussion that isn’t hard to find. The expectation that Kyrie Irving is going to magically reappear on Christmas Day and be the exact same player he was on February 28th, 2025 is not fair to him. In fact, if you don’t believe Jason Kidd, take Kyrie’s own words from over the summer for it, as he talked about this process on his own Twitch streams.
The fact of the matter is this. Kyrie Irving, an aging small guard with an extensive history of lower body injuries, is recovering from a severe knee injury. It is going to take an extraordinary amount of work just for him to return to the court at all. You’ll see that this week, as the Mavs start practice in Vancouver, Irving will be out there getting some individual drills and work done. It’s all part of the process to complete step one. Once he does that, it’ll take even longer for Kyrie to start feeling like himself again.
The road back from an injury such as his, at his age in particular, is not linear. There will be days when he looks like peak Kyrie on the floor. But there will also be days when he looks a step slow. It’s part of the recovery process, as he and others have explained ever since the injury. This season, if he comes back at all, you could expect to see something between 50-70% of the Kyrie Irving you saw on March 2, 2025. To expect anything but that this season is doing yourself, Kyrie and the rest of the group a disservice.
