Dallas Mavericks star guard Kyrie Irving didn’t start out his pro career in the most optimal situation. He was selected with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft by a Cleveland Cavaliers team that was on the heels of a 19-win season and still reeling from losing star forward LeBron James to the Miami Heat.
Irving enjoyed very little team success in his first three seasons at the highest level before James reunited with the Cavaliers and kicked off his second stint in Cleveland. Irving’s Cavaliers never won more than 33 games in a single campaign and also failed to qualify for the playoffs even once before James returned.
The 33-year-old guard recently revealed that in the early days of his pro career, he formed a lot of “bad habits” while losing games.
Kyrie Irving reflects on the early stages of his NBA career
“I had a lot of bad habits as a young player, and that came from losing games and just trying to get buckets all the time… When I’m done playing, you guys will hear the real story.” pic.twitter.com/CcrL61MJkk
— FearBuck (@FearedBuck) August 9, 2025
Of course, it didn’t take very long after James returned to the Cavaliers for Irving to prove that he wasn’t merely an empty calories scorer. In his first postseason run in the 2015 NBA Playoffs, he helped Cleveland reach the NBA Finals and averaged 19.0 points per game across 13 contests. Unfortunately, injury woes held him to just one game played in the championship series after he also missed some time in the conference finals.
But he put together a healthy playoff run the following season during the Cavaliers’ journey to a title. He averaged more than 25 points per game in the 2016 NBA Playoffs en route to the team’s first championship in franchise history and also hit one of the biggest shots in playoff history in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
He nailed a 3-pointer over star guard Stephen Curry to give the Cavaliers a three-point lead with less than one minute to go in the deciding game. With the Game 7 win, Irving and company completed an unbelievable series comeback against the Golden State Warriors after being in a 1-3 hole.
All in all, Irving’s bad habits that he might’ve developed earlier in his career didn’t stop him from winning a ring with James, and the former deserves credit for acclimating to playing for winning teams during that era in team history.