Saturday night, February 1st, delivered an all-time shocker to the NBA universe.

The Los Angeles Lakers, the most glitzy big brand in basketball and arguably the greatest franchise in league history, pulled off a seemingly out-of-nowhere trade for Luka Doncic, arguably the best guard in the league and one of the three or four overall best players in the world today.

Disbelief registered all over the sports world, not just because of the names involved — L.A. sent superstar center/power forward Anthony Davis to the Dallas Mavericks as part of the deal — but also because basically nobody outside of the Lakers and Mavs’ front offices saw it coming. The whole thing launched a thousand breaking-news TV segments and emergency podcasts and hastily thrown-together columns (hello). Luka Doncic and LeBron James are teammates is a scream-worthy headline on its own. Along with, Anthony Davis and LeBron are no longer teammates. The Lakers have their next franchise centerpiece. The Mavs just gave theirs up with no warning.

And there’s one more important figure in all of this that isn’t getting nearly as many mentions in the conversation: Kyrie Irving.

In case you forgot about him in all of the weekend’s mayhem, Irving is the eight-time All-Star and three-time All-NBA guard who came to Dallas in 2023 expected to be the volume-scoring sidekick Doncic needed to put the Mavericks in championship contention. After all, Irving had already excelled in a similar role next to LeBron in Cleveland, helping the Cavaliers win the 2016 title. Kyrie and LeBron made it to the NBA Finals in their first season together; Kyrie and Luka did the same in their first full season together. Dallas won the Western Conference and faced the Boston Celtics in the 2024 NBA Finals, but the future Hall of Fame backcourt tandem couldn’t overcome a deeper and defensively superior Celtics squad.

Following up on the Finals appearance, this season was not off to a good start. Doncic suffered a knee injury in November that caused him to miss about a week, and then on Christmas Day he suffered a calf injury from which he has yet to return. Dallas played 49 games this season before the big trade, and Luka missed 27 of them. Kyrie missed 10 games with back and shoulder injuries. The Mavs, meanwhile, were 26-23 on the day of the trade, hovering in the range of teams competing for postseason play-in spots instead of battling with the teams at the top of the West standings. Kyrie would have to lead the charge in pulling them out of the play-in pool until Luka came back.

Before Saturday’s trade, I actually had a draft of an article saved in the Ummah Sport dashboard tentatively titled, “How Far Can Kyrie Irving Carry the Mavericks?” that focused on the world’s most prominent active Muslim basketball player. Working off the hypothetical that Luka would be out for a long time, I wanted to explore whether Irving could actually get back to the Finals or even win a title as his team’s No. 1 option.

Well, now Luka is out of the Dallas lineup for good. He’s been replaced by Davis, who like Irving was once upon a time a No. 1 star on a non-contender (New Orleans for Davis, pre-LeBron Cleveland for Kyrie) before realizing their respective potential and having the best stretches of their careers as the No. 2 on championship-level teams.

So what does the league-altering transaction mean for Irving?

Terms like “end of an era” and “new chapter” have been used ad nauseam for the post-Luka Mavs. Kyrie was a key cog in the bygone era — the peak of Luka’s career happened when Irving was playing alongside him — and Kyrie will be the face of the franchise (or co-face of the franchise with Davis) as the new chapter gets underway. Davis could eventually be the undisputed No. 1 player that the Mavs build around, but as he adjusts and gets settled in Dallas, Irving will at least temporarily have that spot. And he may even hold onto it for a while. Irving (32) is slightly older than Davis (31), and Irving is already established in Dallas. As the lead guard, Irving will have the ball in his hands more than Davis, and Irving isn’t exactly a natural pass-first playmaker; he’s a scorer whose job has always been to look for his shot. It’s easy to see Davis, like he did in L.A. with LeBron, deferring to the older incumbent star right off the bat.

Irving has grown accustomed to playing with bigger superstars — Doncic in Dallas, Kevin Durant in Brooklyn, LeBron in Cleveland — and he thrives in that role. The last time he was a team’s definite No. 1 option was during his two-year stint with the Celtics from 2017 to 2019; he left Boston before Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown blossomed into stars in their own right. Now at 32, Irving could find himself back in that position.

Irving is averaging 24.3 points, 4.8 assists, and 1.2 steals per game this season, shooting 47.9 percent from the field, 41.5 percent from 3-point range, and 90.1 percent from the free throw line. He was not selected to the 2025 All-Star Game, his scoring output is the lowest it’s been since his final season in Boston six years ago, he’s averaging fewer than five assists for the first time in nine years, when he was playing alongside the de facto point guard that is LeBron in Cleveland. Five times this season Irving has scored 35-plus points in a game, and for whatever it’s worth, the Mavs are 1-4 in those games. His season-high effort of 46 points came in a loss to the lowly Portland Trail Blazers.

Those numbers suggest Dallas could struggle with Irving taking the reins from Doncic, but then there’s the Davis factor. AD was having an MVP-caliber season early on, and while he’s fallen out of that award race, he’s still been great, averaging 25.7 points, 11.9 rebounds, and 2.1 blocks per game and remaining in the mix to be a Defensive Player of the Year finalist. The star tandem of Kyrie and AD looks like a tough postseason out on paper, and that’s before you throw in the Mavs’ quality role players such as Daniel Gafford, P.J. Washington, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Dereck Lively II … oh, and Dallas also happens to have one of the greatest shooters of all time in aging veteran Klay Thompson.

Irving’s future is as much up in the air as the rest of the big names involved in Saturday’s mega-deal. He has a $43 million player option on his contract for next season; if he declines the option, he can become a free agent and leave Dallas. At this age and stage in his career, will his next stop be his last?

The rest of this season will offer a stage for Kyrie to audition for whatever his next role will be — whether that’s in Dallas or somewhere else — even if more eyes will be focused on what’s happening with the main principles of the blockbuster trade that created Irving’s new chapter.