Kyrie Irving started the finals slowly before. He responded then. Can he do it again?

DALLAS — Eight years ago, with Kyrie Irving’s team down 2-0 in the NBA Finals, Harvey Araton wrote this in The New York Times:

“Irving was supposed to carry an offensive load in this series, ease the burden on (his co-star).”

Irving now plays for the Dallas Mavericks, not the Cleveland Cavaliers, and his co-star is Luka Dončić, not LeBron James. Otherwise, the sentence holds up word for word. There are several reasons the Mavericks have lost their first two games of the 2024 NBA Finals despite the Boston Celtics’ awfully beatable performance in Sunday’s Game 2. The one that most stands out is Irving’s miserable performance.

In two games against his former team, Irving has made just 13 shots and zero 3-pointers. He’s shooting 35.1 percent from the field with only eight total assists. The second statistic reveals Boston’s chosen defensive path against him; the Celtics are most often guarding Irving one-on-one and have switched nearly all of his pick-and-rolls to ensure that.

The first one, his shooting percentage, shows why. Even though Irving is one of the most talented shot makers in league history, Boston trusts any of its perimeter defenders — two of whom (Derrick White and Jrue Holiday) were named to this year’s All-Defense team — to limit him.

But Irving has limited himself in this series too. Per Second Spectrum, his effective field goal percentage is almost 10 percent worse than what would be expected based on the shots he’s taken. (Dončić’s is 10 percent better.) Irving has missed all three of his 3-point attempts without a defender within 6 feet of him. He’s made only three of the 11 shots he’s attempted from outside of the restricted area but within the paint.

In the regular season, Irving hit about 53 percent of his shots in that area while taking nearly five per game. While Irving’s known as arguably the league’s premier dribbler, his moves more often lead him into the space around the basket than directly at it at this stage of his career. He’s just missing those shots now.

Irving has lost 12 straight games to the Celtics, dating to his time with the Brooklyn Nets. In Dallas’ game at TD Garden this regular season, Irving shot just 9 of 23 — including six straight missed 3s before making one late.

His history with the Celtics, and his reflections upon it this past week, has been thoroughly covered. So, too, have the boos, the blowup dolls and the “Kyrie sucks” chants he faced during the opening two games in Boston. Although he has not interacted with the center-court logo, burned sage or given fans the finger, Irving still saw what the Boston crowd directed at him. He didn’t quite admit he was affected by any of it, but he said at Tuesday’s practice that the TD Garden atmosphere was on his mind.

“Being back in Boston, there’s such a level of desire that I have inside of me to play well,” Irving said. “Wanted to be there for my teammates. As a competitor, it’s frustrating. But I don’t want to let that seep in or spill over to any other decisions I have to make there as a player.”

Dallas, and Dončić, need Irving to be better to have any chance in the series.

“The margin of their victories hasn’t really displayed the full story in terms of the Celtics beating us,” Irving said.

Boston has generated the shots it wants, even if 3s haven’t fallen at their usual rate, while limiting the qualities that had made Dallas’ offense effective. The Mavericks only have two lob dunks after throwing down 57 through the postseason’s first 17 games. They’ve also attempted only eight corner 3s after amassing 198 in the playoffs’ opening three rounds. These are, partially, the perils of facing Boston’s superb defense.

But one way to make the Celtics blink, and open up more space on any given offensive possession, is for Irving to make enough shots to draw more attention his way. That’s what Dončić did in Game 2, forcing the Celtics to make small-but-notable adjustments to how they were guarding him. If he and Irving are both doing that, those small cracks could engorge in a manner that unleashes Irving’s teammates. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps, if Irving provides efficient scoring, it’s just efficient scoring. That’d still help.

“I can be a lot more fundamentally sound, technical on my shots,” Irving said. “They’re sending specific strategies against me to make it difficult. We’re at the highest stage in the world. It’s a small sample size. We only get a seven-game series potentially. I just can feel the stakes being raised up a little bit more. The pressure is natural. Makes diamonds.”

Irving is the only player in the Mavericks rotation who has even been to the finals before. He has one of the most iconic shots ever made, a winning 3 in Game 7 over Stephen Curry to beat the Golden State Warriors in 2016. In that series, as documented by The New York Times, he started slow. Through the first two games, he scored just 36 points on 33 percent shooting with only one made 3. He averaged 31 points on 51 percent shooting in the final five games.

“It took a lot of will to win in 2016,” Irving said after Game 2. “If you asked me in September or October, ‘Would I want a chance to be down 0-2 and having a chance to respond in Game 3 or be out of the playoffs?’ I think I would choose the former. It’s as simple as that. We’re the only teams left.”

It took a lot more than his surge for the Cavaliers to come back and win in 2016. The same will be true for Dallas to rally and win this series. But back then, eight years ago, Irving responded.

He has to do so again.

Required Reading

(Top photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)