In an interview with Shannon Sharpe, former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban opened up about why the team traded for Kyrie Irving after he had several controversial seasons at his previous teams.
Around the six-minute point of the interview on Club Shay Shay, which can be seen above, Sharpe asked Cuban why he decided to welcome Irving into the fold despite some disappointing seasons and off-court controversies. Ultimately, he was able to assess that signing him wasn't a risk by talking to him directly.
"You talk to him, you talk to the people around him … When you watch Kyrie after the game… [He’s] one of those guys, he’s going to hug you like he’s known you for 20 years and you guys are first cousins," he shared. "And that says something when guys are getting that close to each other. When you talk to players, they loved him. Nobody had a bad word to say about Kyrie that ever stepped on the court. To me, that was all we needed to know."
During his time at the Boston Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets, the 32-year-old guard ran into issues that got in the way of his time in the court. During his first year at the Celtics, he experienced a season-ending injury and then garnered controversy for promoting conspiracy theories. Then at the Nets, he experienced another season-ending injury and then he decided not to get vaccinated against COVID-19, despite New York City having a mandate at the time.
Cuban said that upon analyzing what “went wrong” when Irving was in Brooklyn and Boston, a lot of it came down to maturity. “But a lot of it was circumstances, too,” he said. “How often is COVID going to hit and lead to those circumstances? What we learned was, you just let Kyrie be Kyrie. I love talking to the guy. … He’s got a heart of gold, he’s got a huge heart and he wants to help people.”
While Mavericks missed out on the playoffs during his first season with the team, he experienced a renaissance season in 2024 and helped take the team to the NBA Finals for the first time in over a decade.
Before Cuban put in the work to get to know him, however, he considered Kyrie “a team killer,” but he hadn’t directly talked to him. “When the opportunity to trade for him came, okay, let’s do the work. … Everybody loved him,” he added.
He also said that he made sure to help him out when he got dropped by some of his sponsors. “If you notice the deals he signed since he came to us, there’s no problems, there’s no issues because we just let Kyrie be Kyrie,” he said.
Watch the full interview with Cuban up top.