The Indiana basketball team produced an all-time great in Isiah Thomas. He was a great NBA player but is he one of the most underrated players of all time?
As a freshman in college, I worked as a student manager for my mid-major school’s basketball team. Part of my responsibilities included mandatory attendance to work the team’s summer basketball camps.
As hundreds of kids poured through the door every morning, I saw a lot of different NBA jerseys. Undoubtedly, the most worn jersey was Steph Curry (anyone could have guessed that), but second place for jerseys? You may be surprised. Kevin Durant was up there but definitely not second, there was ONE Giannis Antetokounmpo jersey (this was pre-MVP season), almost no Lebron James (again, Curry reigns supreme among tykes and Lebron is Curry’s enemy).
In a sample size of over one thousand kids, the second-most popular jersey was undoubtedly Kyrie Irving. I was pretty astonished. If I was a parent, Irving would be maybe the last basketball player I would want my child to idolize. He is incredibly gifted but is a selfish basketball player and well-known locker room cancer.
During the last camp of the summer, I was curious, so I polled my six-year-old buddy Luke — a player on my team who wore the same Kyrie jersey and shoes every single day for camp. Now Luke was maybe the least Kyrie-like player I had ever seen. He loved passing to his teammates as they played on the little six-foot hoop. Luke also won the camp award for the best attitude. He was a delightful kid and maybe the only one in the whole camp who didn’t misbehave one time. He was a far cry from Kyrie Irving, a man who was about to demand a trade from Cleveland to do his own thing in Boston before ultimately setting the Celtics locker room on fire and going on his merry way to Brooklyn.
“Luke, I don’t get it. Why do you like Kyrie so much?” I asked him. In response to my question, Luke grinned at me with a huge semi-toothless smile. “He’s the coolest!” he replied.
Would Luke think the same about Isiah Thomas if he saw him play?