{"id":127162,"date":"2025-03-06T07:20:03","date_gmt":"2025-03-06T12:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/?p=127162"},"modified":"2025-03-06T07:20:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T12:20:03","slug":"mavericks-jason-kidd-kyrie-irving-injury-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/2025\/03\/06\/mavericks-jason-kidd-kyrie-irving-injury-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Mavericks’ Jason Kidd Refutes ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Injury Narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyrie Irving<\/span><\/a>\u00a0going down\u00a0<\/span>with an ACL tear that wiped out his season<\/span><\/a>\u00a0was a tragic blow for him, the\u00a0<\/span>Dallas Mavericks<\/span><\/a>, and the NBA in general. When Anthony Davis eventually returned from his injury, the Mavs were expected to join the West’s top teams for championship contention. Now, not only is his this year washed away, but next season, too, is in doubt. After Kyrie’s season fate was diagnosed, a narrative quickly arose through the media insinuating the injury was caused by increased stress on his body. However, if you ask Mavericks head coach\u00a0<\/span>Jason Kidd<\/span><\/a>, Kyrie’s injury had nothing to do with the uptick in workload. It’s a narrative the veteran head coach refutes passionately, calling it a conspiracy theory.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mavericks’ Jason Kidd Refutes ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Injury Narrative<\/h2>\n

Dallas Mavericks HC Jason Kidd Passionately Pushes Back On Kyrie Irving’s Minutes Narrative<\/h3>\n

According to Mike Curtis of The Dallas Morning News<\/span><\/a>, Kidd labels Kyrie’s ACL as a freak injury rather than anything else. Irving saw a significant uptick in playing time over the last two months since\u00a0<\/span>Luka Don\u010di\u0107<\/span><\/a>\u00a0went down with injury on Christmas Day. His workload didn’t get any lighter even after the trade when\u00a0<\/span>Anthony Davis<\/span><\/a>\u00a0also suffered his own injury. With a severely depleted roster, especially at the center and forward positions, the Mavericks have had to lean on Kyrie more than ever. So, when a narrative began to spin, it further painted a bad picture of the organization and Kidd. He didn’t take it kindly, and responded to the speculation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe load didn\u2019t have anything to do with the injury.\u00a0<\/em>We\u2019re talking about one play. It\u2019s a freak accident. That\u2019s how it should be reported, but we\u2019re not reporting it right. We\u2019re reporting on conspiracy theories.\u00a0<\/em>We want our stars to play as many minutes [as possible],\u201d <\/em>Kidd continued. \u201cThis isn\u2019t supposed to be a \u2018rest\u2019 league. Kai is our leader. Kai was playing [high] minutes. He also was playing at a high level, maybe some of the best basketball that he\u2019s played in his career. And it\u2019s all right to play 40 minutes. We can\u2019t talk from both sides and say that our stars don\u2019t play enough minutes or guys don\u2019t play enough.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Furthermore, Kidd explained that Irving accepted the significant increase in minutes and was well-conditioned enough to do it. It’s clear that Kidd isn’t buying the “we’re running our players into the ground” notion. Nevertheless, whatever caused Kyrie’s injury\u2014a freak accident or workload\u2014it doesn’t do much to speculate further. Dallas is without its leader, and their playoff chances have all but fallen off the cliff.<\/p>\n

Shut Them All Down<\/h3>\n

Dallas has good enough reason to close the doors on a playoff push with less than 20 games remaining in the season. Several NBA analysts, such as ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and\u00a0<\/span>Kendrick Perkins<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0have suggested that the Mavs shut down Davis,\u00a0<\/span>Daniel Gafford<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0<\/span>Dereck Lively<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for the rest of the season. This would allow all three to focus on the recovery process going into the offseason and all through the summer. This road might be best to take for the long haul. Even if\u00a0<\/span>all three big men return before the playoffs<\/span><\/a>, A) the Mavs might have fallen too far down the standings by then. B) Without Kyrie, they have no chance of success anyway. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a9 Jerome Miron-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kyrie Irving\u00a0going down\u00a0with an ACL tear that wiped out his season\u00a0was a tragic blow for him, the\u00a0Dallas Mavericks, and the NBA in general. When Anthony Davis eventually returned from his injury, the Mavs were expected to join the West’s top teams for championship contention. Now, not only is his this year washed away, but next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5081,"featured_media":127170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1608,30,62],"tags":[240,1453,49797,218,3215,406,1133],"class_list":["post-127162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-basketball","category-mavericks","category-nba","tag-anthony-davis","tag-daniel-gafford","tag-dereck-lively","tag-jason-kidd","tag-kendrick-perkins","tag-kyrie-irving","tag-luka-doncic"],"modified_by":"Aaron J Zacharias","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5081"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127180,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127162\/revisions\/127180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}