Cleveland Cavaliers: Revisiting the LeBron James and Kyrie Irving fallout

Understanding LeBron James

Now, it’s time to attempt to understand LeBron James’ intentions and see where his actions may have rubbed Kyrie Irving the wrong way.

For LeBron, returning to Cleveland was his chance to fulfill on the promise he never kept. James declared that he would one day win a championship for the city and end their title drought. Unfortunately, he left to the Miami Heat before he could accomplish this in his first stint with the Cavaliers.

While James was in Miami, the Cavs went off the deep end. The team won only 19 games in the season directly following James’ departure. Of course, Irving was building his reputation, but the team he played for was struggling to win games. The Cavaliers would miss the playoffs for all four seasons in which James was in Miami.

So, when LeBron announced his comeback to the Cavaliers, he likely didn’t expect there to be any issues. The franchise had been lackluster since he left and he was the one that could bring them back to championship contention.

With James came the addition of Kevin Love and a few other veteran players. However, the core of this team was with James, Love and Irving. The only problem here was that James was the only one of the three with any playoff experience.

As the years went on, LeBron was tasked with accelerating the development of both Irving and Love to allow them to compete as soon as possible. This was only made more difficult as a few unfortunate injuries to both stars would stifle their first NBA Finals run.

In LeBron’s mind, he was only trying to teach his teammates what it took to win a championship. But for a guy like Kyrie Irving, a mentor wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. Kyrie wanted to do things his own way, which obviously caused these two stars to clash.