Kyrie Irving rumors: Lakers, Knicks among five potential destinations for Nets’ All-Star point guard

Kyrie Irving, without hyperbole, might genuinely be the most complicated trade candidate in NBA history. This is not simply a matter of risk vs. reward. We’re talking about one of the more unpredictable players the NBA has ever seen. He’s pledged to stay with every team he’s ever departed. He pledged not to retire last season as well… how confident would an acquiring team be in him keeping his word? Trading for Irving would require complete organizational buy-in. You’d have to do it with the understanding that he’s going to miss games due to injury, and he’s going to miss games for reasons other than injury as well. He’s going to say bizarre things. He’s going to make your coach’s life difficult.

And he’s going to make the biggest shots of your season. That’s what makes finding a reasonable trade so difficult. Irving is the rare player who might actually be good enough to justify this sort of dysfunction, and the Nets know it. Trading him would make them worse on the court. It might even take them out of championship contention. There is simply no way, given the risk he poses, that any team acquiring him would give the Nets fair value back in a deal. Coming in, it would be a potential lose-lose situation for both parties involved.

In that sense, the Nets probably should just keep Irving. He has a $36 million player option and fairly limited leverage to force a trade with it. The only teams with enough cap space to realistically pursue him in free agency are so far out of the championship picture that he’d never want to play for them in the first place. The Indiana Pacers will not be signing Kyrie Irving this offseason. He’s probably going to stay with the Nets for that reason. He can’t force his way to his preferred destination and they can’t trade him for their preferred package because his value has tanked so low that such a package probably doesn’t exist.

But with The Athletic’s Shams Charania reporting that the two sides are at an impasse in contract negotiations, it’s worth exploring who might actually be able to pull off a deal for Irving. A deal probably needs to meet all or most of the following conditions to be feasible considering the risks it would pose to all parties involved:

• The destination would have to prove acceptable to Irving. He simply isn’t worth the headache if he doesn’t want to be somewhere.
• The returning package has to at least keep the Nets…