Basketball's most exciting young player was just lost for a month to his third significant injury in three years. Is it possible that he's just one of those guys?
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Kyrie Irving is in his third year of playing basketball since high school. In those three years, he's sustained three significant injuries: ligament tears in his right big toe that kept him out of all but 11 games during his college career; a shoulder injury last year; and now, a hairline fracture in his finger that will keep him off the court for the next month. You can see the fracture below; a freak accident, it seems to happen when Darren Collison rises for a layup and his knee collides with Irving's hand. Irving tries to shake it off and continues to play, but he left the game for good pretty soon afterward.
Irving looks like he might be one of those guys who can't stay healthy no matter what, who seem to have bones made of licorice and ligaments like rubber bands — let's call them the Perpetual Injury Guys. It's a group where Stephen Curry, a tremendously exciting player, has become firmly established after missing all but 26 games last year with a bum ankle; Greg Oden and Yao Ming were members. Is Kyrie Irving a Perpetual Injury Guy? And if he is, what does that mean for the Cleveland Cavaliers?
Watching Irving, you see the type of innate, fluid ability that very few athletes possess, the ability to change the nature of a play that can't be taught so much as felt. Check out the play below, in which Irving seems to lose the ball but in fact has it on a tether; after splitting two defenders, he slings a pass behind his back to a subsequently wide-open Anderson Varejao.