Cleveland Cavaliers star Kyrie Irving admitted teammate LeBron James confronted him earlier in the season about being a ball hog. Since then, Irving said, he has yet to finish a game without recording at least one assist.
It didn't take long for James to call out Irving for not passing enough. The Cavaliers started the season 1-3, and after that fourth loss - a 102-100 defeat at Utah, in which Irving finished with 34 points and zero assists - James felt compelled to confront the team's starting point guard.
"He came up to me and was like, 'One, you can never have another game with no assists,'" Irving said, describing James' words, via the North East Ohio Media Group. "'You can damn near have just one, two, three, but you can't have zero.' And I was like, 'All right, cool, it won't happen again.' And it hasn't happened since that game."
The stats prove it: Irving has dished out at least one assist in every subsequent game. ESPN's Brian Windhorst appeared on Bill Simmons's podcast this week and offered a little more context for the James-Irving confrontation.
"At the beginning of the season, LeBron could not believe how much of a ball hog Dion Waiters and Kyrie Irving were," Windhorst told Simmons, according to Larry Brown Sports. "Their first road trip, they were out west, Kyrie played something like 70 consecutive minutes without an assist. LeBron could not believe it. The first night, he got so frustrated with a game in Portland that he just basically stood over in the corner.
"The next night Kyrie did it again, so LeBron basically had to step to him. LeBron said, 'Hey, you can't play this way. Maybe this is the way you played the last few years, but you can't play this way.' To my surprise, Kyrie listened."
If James and Irving were able to get on the same page, one would think Kevin Love would be able to too. That has yet to happen.
