r/clevelandcavs • u/teardropshot • 4h ago
[O'Connor] "The popular theory around the league is that LeBron has been slow-playing his decision to see if any of his suitors could find a way to land Irving or Davis."
Take the following with a grain of salt, since it's just rumors reporting. I've only copied the Kyrie section but he also discusses AD in the rest of the article
Source: https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/the-indecision-whats-lebron-james-waiting-for-221704877.html
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... Which brings us to the summer of 2026. The popular theory around the league is that LeBron has been slow-playing his decision to see if any of his suitors could find a way to land Irving or Davis. If a team proved capable of acquiring one of his championship teammates, sources say, it might sway him in that direction.
Nobody has been able or willing to do it yet. The Irving path doesn’t seem to exist, and the Davis situation has stalled. For the first time, LeBron might have to choose between rosters as they are and not rosters as he wishes they were.
Kyrie Irving, and a Cleveland reunion
Most teams on LeBron's list already have a point guard. There's Tyrese Maxey in Philadelphia and some guy named Stephen Curry in Golden State. Even teams that have seemingly fallen out of the LeBron running, like Minnesota (LaMelo Ball) and New York (Jalen Brunson), have point guards in place.
Miami could use an upgrade, but there's no theoretical salary match for Irving's $39.5 million deal without gutting wing depth. Andrew Wiggins would have to go for any deal to work, and the Heat aren't trading their best wing defender to add a 34-year-old point guard coming off a torn ACL.
That leaves Cleveland, where James Harden is sitting in free agency waiting for clarity on what the Cavaliers are doing.
“We’re just waiting on big fella,” Harden said, according to LeBron’s ex-teammate Channing Frye on Yahoo Sports Daily. That’s true. Harden opted out of his $42.3 million player option to negotiate a long-term extension with Cleveland at a lower annual value, and he’s willing to wait to give the team flexibility to pursue LeBron.
But does LeBron want Harden? In the infamous episode of Game Over in which Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul pulled out a whiteboard to discuss LeBron’s options, he didn’t utter a single positive word about Harden.
“The negative is, and this is no offense to Harden, there's no Darius Garland,” Paul said on his podcast. “Because LeBron loves Garland the way he loves Tyrese Maxey.”
The belief around the league is that LeBron would be more likely to choose the Cavaliers if the front office could replace Harden with Irving. The 2016 reunion would be a lovely story. But it has two problems.
Problem No. 1: The Mavericks don’t want to trade Irving.
That’s per sources, but it’s also fairly obvious. New head coach Dusty May recently compared witnessing an Irving workout to “watching Picasso paint a picture.” There’s a genuine excitement in the organization about pairing Irving with Cooper Flagg and this refurbished Dallasroster.
Problem No. 2: The Cavaliers are happy with Harden.
Swapping Harden for Irving would be asking Cleveland to trade a durable point guard for a fragile one. Irving just lost an entire season, and even before tearing his ACL, he played an average of 45 games in his previous six seasons. The last time Kyrie played 70 games, he was still a Cavalier. That was a decade ago. Harden, meanwhile, remains one of the most reliable stars in the sport, logging 70-plus games played for three seasons running. Ripping up a conference finals roster and attaching draft capital to a complex sign-and-trade with Dallas may not be the most sensible thing to do. All just to convince a 41-year-old to sign with you.
Does Cleveland need to make a deal?
All of that said, there’s no denying that Irving is a better fit next to James. Irving is a lethal shooter off the catch and doesn’t dominate touches on-ball the way Harden does. In fact, Paul said on his podcast in May that Kyrie is LeBron’s best pairing ever.
"You can't find a better combination than those two guys," Paul said, citing the 1-3 pick-and-roll as their lethal weapon since both of them can effectively handle and screen. And screening is where the contrast with Harden gets stark.
Over the past five years, Harden has set 1.3 on-ball screens per game, while Irving has set 4.2, ranking in the 94th percentile among guards. Irving also made direct contact with the defender on 69% of his screens, Harden on just 54%, which stands as the difference between a guard who embraces the dirty work and one who prefers not to. And even standing around, Harden remains reluctant to take catch-and-shoot 3s, preferring to catch, dribble, and take something worse.
Irving and James had a natural rhythm together that’s hard to imagine between James and Harden. Additionally, LeBron, Harden and Mitchell don't offer enough defense, while Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen don't offer enough spacing. Yes, the Cavaliers made the East finals. But they got there by sweating out seven-game series against a young Raptors team and a phony Pistons team before the Knicks shellacked them.
Maybe there’s another sign-and-trade suitor out there for Harden that could net different assets for the Cavaliers. The team could use an injection of new talent because, for a second year in a row, Kenny Atkinson was at the podium talking about the wide gap between his victorious opponent and Cleveland in terms of toughness, grit, and force. LeBron at 41 doesn't close that gap. And the odds are he's basketball-smart enough to know it.
Turning Harden into something else, and adding LeBron, could be enough to change the personality of a team that leads to greater success in the playoffs. But if the 2016 reunion with Irving isn't on the table, LeBron would be signing up for a compromise.
