Brooklyn Nets: Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving pairing explosive — both good and bad

With a rumor circulating that the Brooklyn Nets are looking at an aggressive play to sign Kyrie Irving and trade for Anthony Davis, we look at the pairing.

The report at this point comes from just a single source, but there are rumors afoot the Brooklyn Nets have a very ambitious plan to make the leap to the next level in the NBA hierarchy.

And while the prospect of pairing superstars Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic is certainly an attractive and intriguing one, it is not one that doesn’t come with a considerable potential for disaster.

Chris Broussard of FOX Sports started the ball rolling on the Davis-Irving pairing with comments he made earlier this week while appearing on The Herd with Colin Cowherd.

It would be a complicated process that would involve the Nets and Pelicans agreeing to the backbone of a trade for Davis in advance of the NBA Draft so that Brooklyn would be able to make their first-round picks at No. 17 and No. 27 overall on behalf of New Orleans.

Broussard said the nuts and bolts of a trade would be this:

Nets general manager Sean Marks and Pelicans president of basketball operations David Griffin would have to agree to the deal prior to the draft.

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The Nets would then sign D’Angelo Russell to a new deal at whatever terms Russell and New Orleans have agreed to and turn the swap into a sign-and-trade.

Oh, and by the way, Brooklyn would also have to sign Irving as a free agent, based on the widely held assumption he will, in fact, opt out of the final year of the five-year extension he originally signed while with the Cleveland Cavaliers in July 2014.

On paper, the deal would push Brooklyn into the top tier of the Eastern Conference, provided they could cobble together enough depth around the superstar tandem.

Irving’s max extension was the reason the Boston Celtics couldn’t make a play for Davis before the trade deadline this season. Davis is also on a max extension of his rookie contract, signed in July 2015, and teams are prohibited from trading for more than one player on such a deal.

The Celtics had acquired Irving in a trade from Cleveland in August 2017 and were thus unable to make a play for Davis while Irving’s contract was still active.

The positives to a potential Davis-Irving pairing are immense.

Irving is a former All-NBA performer, a six-time All-Star and helped the Cavaliers to an NBA title in 2016.

Davis is already a three-time All-NBA selection, a three-time All-Defensive selection, has led the league in blocks three times and, like Kyrie, has been named to six All-Star games.

Last season, Davis averaged 25.9 points, 12.0 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 2.4 blocks and 1.6 steals in 33.0 minutes per game, shooting 51.7 percent overall and 33.1 percent on 2.6 3-point attempts per game.

The rebounding, assists and steal numbers all represented career-highs for Davis, a seven-year veteran. His other numbers dipped a bit from 2017-18, but he also averaged 3.4 fewer minutes per game.

Irving, meanwhile, put up 23.8 points, 6.9 assists, 5.0 rebounds and 1.5 steals in 33.0 minutes per game on 48.7 percent overall shooting while hitting 40.1 percent on 6.5 deep attempts per game.

He posted career-highs in assists and rebounds. But his other numbers dipped despite a marginal increase (less than a minute per game) in playing time.

But such a move is also fraught with potential problems, most of them stemming from the fact Davis and Irving are two of the most fragile superstars in the NBA.

In seven NBA seasons, Davis has never played in more than 75 games and has missed at least 14 games in five of his seven seasons. Last season, he appeared in a career-low 56 games due to injuries and the uncertainty he created when his trade request went public.

In eight years in the NBA, Irving has never played in more than 76 games and has missed at least 10 games in seven of his eight seasons. Irving missed 15 games with various ailments this season and then had the worst playoff performance of his career on top of that.

After missing the 2018 playoffs — and Boston’s second straight run to the Eastern Conference Finals — Irving shot just 38.5 percent overall and 31.0 percent on 6.4 long-range attempts per game as the Celtics followed up a first-round sweep of Indiana with a Game 1 win at Milwaukee in the conference semifinals with four straight losses — three of them blowouts.

Irving was positively horrific against Milwaukee, shooting 35.6 percent overall and 21.9 percent on 32 3-point attempts over the five games. Throw in 18 turnovers in five outings and Irving was a one-man wrecking crew — wrecking his own team.

But at least Irving has some deep playoff runs to his credit.

No superstar of this era has gotten more of a free pass for his utter lack of playoff success than Anthony Davis.

His playoff resume is a short one, just two appearances overall. There was a first-round sweep at the hands of the Golden State Warriors in 2015 and a sweep of the Portland Trail Blazers in 2018 that was followed by a five-game exit at the hands of the Warriors.

Davis has been individually outstanding in the postseason — 30.5 points, 12.7 rebounds, 2.5 blocks and 1.8 steals in 40.8 minutes per game over 13 career playoff games. But he’s also committed 36 turnovers in those 13 games — an extremely high number for a frontcourt player.

All that said, the prospect of pairing Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn is a very exciting one.

It’s just not without a significant amount of risk that it could go sideways. Given the Nets history with megadeals for superstars, it would be naive to not at least acknowledge that.