Kyrie Irving wasn’t able to be on the court with his teammates to finish last season, as the Cavs fell to Golden State in the Finals with Kyrie suffering a fractured knee cap in Game 1. Now, he’s promising to help the Cavs play with an edge this season. Irving said during Cleveland’s media day on Monday that the team will play with “more rage” and not “too much smiling.”
More, from our friend Dave McMenamin at ESPN:
More than three months after the Cleveland Cavaliers lost their Finals matchup with the Golden State Warriors, several Cavs team leaders say they plan to funnel that disappointment to fuel them for the 2015-16 season.
“From me there’s going to be a lot more rage, a lot more emotion,” Cavs guard Kyrie Irving said at the team’s media day Monday. “There won’t be too much smiling or anything like that from our team. That’s the mentality we have to have. We’re looking forward to the challenge.”
Irving’s declaration echoed LeBron James’, who is coming off the fourth Finals loss of his career. James shared how the Miami Heat’s championship defeat at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 put his team in the proper mindset to take it all in 2012.
“One thing that we did that didn’t even need to be talked about after we lost our first year in Miami when we came back, we was angry,” James said. “We was very, very, very angry. And everybody that we went against knew it when we came back.”
