Los Angeles Lakers: What Kyrie Irving’s willingness to meet means

1. Kyrie Irving saved LeBron James’ reputation as a teammate.

The optics for Kyrie Irving’s willingness to meet with the Lakers is monumental.

Irving played three seasons with LeBron James in Cleveland and went to the NBA Finals every season together, producing one championship. What better source for this summer’s free agents on how playing with LeBron James on a championship team is there?

In 2017, Irving’s eagerness to forego his annual ticket to the NBA Finals just to get away from James severely damaged James’ reputation as a teammate.

How bad of a teammate was LeBron James for Kyrie Irving to throw away his chances as at an NBA championship every year? Were a championship ring and three straight Finals appearances not worth playing with LeBron James for?

This season, Irving made headlines when he not only apologized to James on his own accord for his own behavior when they were teammates but also shared this information to the media unsolicited.

While Irving could have easily kept this conversation private, Irving chose to share his apology with the rest of the league. This helped undo the damage Irving’s departure from Cleveland inadvertently did to James’ reputation.

Irving’s midseason public apology went long way towards vindicating and absolving James as a difficult teammate.

Now, Irving’s openness to reunite with James challenges and severely undermines the narrative that marquee free agents do not want to play with LeBron James.

In short, Irving’s actions effectively signaled to the rest of the free agent class that James was worth playing with then and is worth playing with now.