Can Brooklyn Nets head coach Steve Nash unlock Kyrie Irving?

Kyrie Irving’s playmaking: Role players

After Kyrie Irving’s time with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he became a more willing passer and better playmaker as shown with the Boston Celtics and his short sample size in Brooklyn.

Assists don’t mean everything, the ball movement is what counts, in this past regular season the teams with the highest secondary assists (hockey assists) mostly were successful teams. Seven out of the 10 teams made the playoffs.

The three teams that didn’t make it were the New Orleans Pelicans and the Memphis Grizzlies who both missed the playoffs by a hair. The Golden State Warriors were the third team, and they finished with the worst record in the NBA. Mind you, the Warriors maintained their championship DNA but lost their best players to injury.

Those seven teams included the mostly Kyrie-less (played 20 games total) Brooklyn Nets. Ball movement is important but Irving getting assist numbers will matter in the long run as opposing teams will fear him as a scorer and playmaker. This makes the team’s offense run better, as we see with Chris Paul or LeBron James being able to threaten the defense with scoring but also making them impossible to double team.

When breaking down Irving’s assist tracking per Stats.NBA.com over the past three seasons it has shown him to be best as an assist maker with 3-point shooters and big men.

In Boston he passed the ball to Al Horford the most by far as in the 17-18 season he passed it to Horford 27.7 percent of the time and in the 18-19 season, it was 23.7 percent of the time. I point this out as the Nets have two rotational centers in Jarrett Allen and DeAndre Jordan, who will frequently be the main guys to get dishes from Kyrie, especially in the pick and roll.

In his 20 games, Irving was looking for his bigs, 1.1 of his assists per game went to Allen, and 0.5 went to Jordan. Getting Kyrie more active in the pick and roll, where he can perform ball handling poetry is his best chance to play make.

Irving has shown a lot of playmaking chops in these situations but more often he’s creating great opportunities for his rollers and not seeing it. Irving can dribble the defense into opening up gaps for bigs and Nash should be able to show Irving these gaps allowing the Brooklyn Nets bigs to roll into the paint.

Despite making these ruthless and impossible shots Irving should look to pass more in pick and roll situations.  Amin Elhassan recently talked about being an intern with the Phoenix Suns and gushed how nice Nash was as a human but also how unique he was as a basketball mind and as a teacher.

"“What separates Steve from a lot of other great players is his ability to verbalize and communicate what his brilliance sees. What I mean by that is this, Magic Johnson is without question one of the smartest, if not the highest basketball IQ in the history of this game… Magic saw things we could never see, the problem is Magic can’t explain what he can see… Steve has the ability to see something none of us can see and then help us see it.”"

Nash is going to be able to explain these sort of openings to anyone and that includes Irving. Nash has a doctorate in the pick and roll, and he should be able to make sets and plays that utilize screeners and free up spot-up shooters. On the Nets currently is Joe Harris (who is an unrestricted free agent) and Taurean Prince who can fit into the spot-up shooter roles and has mentioned the Jordan and Allen duo will be able to get dimes from Irving’s wizardly dribbling.