Alternatively, say they sign him to a 4 year max and he's on relatively good behavior (i.e. no big media scandals and just does more run of the mill weird Kyrie things) but he's on a slow and relative decline. He's a incredibly skilled point guard, but he still is very reliant on his quickness and his ability to get to the hoop has already greatly diminished (he's taking fewer than half as many shots at the rim as his Cleveland days) and he hasn't been exactly a beacon of health in his career. He missed the last three games of the 2021 playoffs. He missed most of 2020, including the bubble. He missed the back quarter of the 2018 season and all of the playoffs. He missed the end of the 2015 playoffs with an injury that kept him out for a quarter of the following season. He hardly played at Duke because of injury.
Taking out his personality from the equation, the trade was for an injury prone declining athlete in his 30s that has been more likely to not make it through the playoffs healthy enough to play than to actually contribute all the way though the playoffs.
The Mavs payed close to market value for a healthy, sane version of Irving, and he's tended to be neither.
Irving is an extremely difficult cover.
You could put Herb Jones, Marcus Smart and Matisse Thybulle on him in triple coverage where they are bracketing him and he'd still cook them off.
The guy has spent an entire career essentially defying horrific shot selection. Every game to Irving is like a game of HORSE. He makes shots on the regular that no one else can even understand at times. This might be one of the few guys where it's impossible to gauge them on metrics. Someone else like that is Joe Dumars. You have to spend time watching Dumars to really get what he was leveling up that wasn't on a stat sheet.
The loss of defense is obviously a concern. But Finney Smith is not replaceable. He was certainly a great story and a great glue guy but you don't get many chances at an All Star like this. The trade was more for Irving's full Bird Rights than for anything else. And this last back end of the season, it's unclear what is going to happen. There's an open path, I can see why the risk is being made.
Cuban might still end up trading him to the Lakers when it's all said and done.
Silver and NBA HQ don't want Irving in LA. But back in the day, when the Mavericks won the championship over the Heat, even with the refs trying to cook off Dallas anyway, David Stern refused to set up and fund the championship parade for them. Cuban pointed out, correctly, that Stern was singling out the Mavericks because he hated Cuban and that NBA HQ did it for everyone else.
That level of pettiness is why Cuban might just unload Irving into the Lakers. Which will cause the NBA all kinds of problems with their sponsors and the networks.
David Stern was a brilliant front line executive. He knew how to market the NBA during some hard dog days. But he was also a psychotic petty tyrant that loved open retaliation just a little too much. The real life bad self inflicted drama with the Buss family, Silver, Cuban, Ballmer and Joe Tsai is like a plotline out of Sons Of Anarchy. Irving is an idiot. But he's not the only idiot in this entire mess.