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Kyrie Irving tried to big league Raptors assistant coach Phil Handy in Cleveland

Phil Handy, an assistant coach with the Toronto Raptors and the team’s head of player development, had put together quite the NBA resume before coming north of the border last summer.

Most notably, he worked in the same role with the Cleveland Cavaliers during their dominance of the Eastern Conference – a squad powered by little-known names such as LeBron James and Kevin Love.

Handy wasn’t brought into the organization to help out players like that, though. His focus was on a budding star that the Cavs selected first overall in the 2011 NBA draft: Kyrie Irving.

“Kyrie was, he was a phenomenal, um, I don’t wanna call him a project,” said Handy during a recent episode of ‘Inside the Green Room’ with Danny Green. “When the Cavs hired me, Mike Brown (Cleveland’s head coach at the time) was like, ‘Listen, I’m hiring you to come here and mentor Kyrie.'”

Like most classic tales of mentorship, things didn’t begin very smoothly as Irving wasn’t too keen about Handy’s influence on his development initially.

(Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)
(Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images)

“I didn’t know Kyrie at all,” said Handy. “And really, he tried to ‘big boy’ me when I got to Cleveland… He was a young kid (and) he was like, ‘I don’t know who you are.’ But, our relationship quickly changed.”

The steps they took together helped set up one of the biggest moments in the history of the Cavaliers: Irving’s clutch three-pointer in the final minute of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals that essentially sealed the championship for Cleveland.

“To be able to see him become a championship-calibre player, instead of just being a good player on a losing team, that was great to just be a part of that with him.”

As Irving, now 26 years old, continues to adjust to being “the guy” with the Boston Celtics, he’ll surely lean on what he learned from Handy and others while in Cleveland.

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