When it was reported, last week, that Kyrie Irving, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ star point guard, wanted to be traded, many basketball fans thought back to the defining moment of his young and superlative career: his game-winning three-pointer in the 2016 N.B.A. Finals, against the favored Golden State Warriors. With fifty-three seconds left in the decisive seventh game, and the score tied, Irving was being guarded by Steph Curry, the league M.V.P. He put the ball between his legs and glided slowly toward the basket while looking for an opening; then, with a quick dribble to his right, he sprang up, leaping over Curry’s outstretched arm and launching a deep jumper. He’d created space to score where, a fraction of a second before, there hadn’t been an inch. The play punctuated a series in which the Cavs made history twice over: the franchise had never before won a championship, and no team had ever come back from a three-games-to-one deficit in the Finals. LeBron James was named the series M.V.P., but it was Irving who had taken the last shot.

“All I was thinking about in the back of my mind was Mamba Mentality,” he told reporters afterward. He was referring to the five-time Lakers champion Kobe Bryant, who at one point dubbed himself the Black Mamba. It was like an artist citing his influences. Bryant was an unstoppable scorer and a clutch performer with a shoot-first mentality and ferocious self-regard. (For years, he feuded with Shaquille O’Neal over bragging rights as the team’s principal star, and O’Neal was eventually traded to Miami.) Irving’s homage to the Mamba was a statement of purpose: he saw himself as the kind of player who should have the ball in his hands as the clock was ticking down. On almost any other team, no one would question whether Irving was on that level. But Irving is on the same team as LeBron James, a superstar rightly called the King. And one had to bend a knee. “I watched Beethoven tonight,” Irving went on to say. “LeBron James composed a game.” The Mamba wasn’t wholly incompatible with the Maestro—Irving is nothing if not a brilliant soloist—but the two pronouncements struck a slightly discordant note.

If Irving had modelled his aggressiveness on Bryant’s, he’d also learned, in a way that Bryant seemingly never did, how to share the stage. James had rejoined Cleveland, his original team, three years into Irving’s pro career. “You see yourself being one of those great players eventually,” Irving has said, referring to James. “And then he ends up joining [your team]. . . . Now you have to almost take a step back and observe.” James pronounced himself a “mentor” at the time, and told Sports Illustrated, “I think I can help Kyrie Irving become one of the best points guards in our league.” Since then, Irving has faced a rare dilemma, perhaps most familiar to Scottie Pippen, who for years was second fiddle to Michael Jordan: he is playing beside someone who is quite possibly the most dominant player in the history of the sport. (Pippen excelled in that role, but when, on one occasion during Jordan’s baseball-playing hiatus, he was asked to defer not to Jordan but to Toni Kukoc, he rebelled.) Ever since Tyronn Lue took over as the Cavs’ head coach, in the middle of the 2016 season, Irving has been encouraged to shoot more and to cultivate his own game as a scorer. He took more shots than James did last year, and held the ball longer. Still, when James was on the bench, the Cavs were mightily outscored in the regular season, playoffs, and finals. But Irving’s restlessness has never had much to do with demonstrable metrics. He wants to move somewhere where he can be the “focal point,” he’s said, and “control” the ball. Playing alongside James for too long can be taxing in a paradoxical way. He’s a team player par excellence, known for making those around him better. But it’s a configuration that, for a soloing star like Irving, must feel like a constant apprenticeship.

For fans, the report about Irving’s demand was totally unexpected, even if the angst underlying it should not have been. And it inevitably raised psychological questions. Was his decision to leave Cleveland an act of hubristic self-sabotage? Did Irving underestimate how hard it would be to earn another appearance in the finals without his current cast? Was he betraying the team’s potential legacy? Maybe. But he deserves some credit, too, or at least a measure of sympathy. The league has been trending in an unsettling direction for the past few years—superstars are joining forces to win championships. Most notably, Kevin Durant, a former M.V.P., joined the Warriors team, which was already favored against Cleveland and had set a record for regular-season wins. (Russell Westbrook, the co-star he left behind on his previous team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, went on to have one of the league’s great individual campaigns; Kobe Bryant has said Westbrook reminds him of himself.) Irving has apparently asked to move in the opposite direction. At twenty-five years old, with four All Star appearances and a championship ring to his name, he would be uncoupling himself from one of the most powerful teams in the league. He wants to make his own way, even if that means wandering in the wilderness.

Irving reportedly told the Cavs’ front office that he preferred to play for one of four other teams—the Knicks, Spurs, Heat, or Timberwolves. There’s no guarantee he’ll end up in any of those places, and recent reports suggest that others teams, such as the Suns, might make a play for him. Since the news of Irving’s defection broke, the Cavs’ owner, Dan Gilbert, has insisted that the situation is “fluid” and that he expects Irving to show up for training camp in September. The team’s management is performing triage at this point; the Cavs have fallen apart in spectacular fashion over the summer. Just days before the draft, last month, Gilbert fired the team’s general manager, then proceeded to miss a string of crucial opportunities to fill out the roster with another marquee talent, such as Paul George or Carmelo Anthony. There are rumors that James is contemplating a move to Los Angeles after the coming season, when he’ll become a free agent.

The future will be messy whether Irving stays or goes. Either way, though, perhaps he’s finally found the kind of protagonist’s role that has eluded him. As the Black Mamba careered toward retirement, in 2016, he made an appraisal that could prove prophetic, and which suggested that a selfish player wasn’t necessarily detrimental to a team’s fortunes. The Cavs, he said, needed a “lightning rod,” a player who could create sparks, an instigator and unpredictable personality capable of generating a particular sort of fiery energy. “LeBron’s not that person,” he explained. “He brings people together. That’s what he does naturally, and he’s phenomenal at it, but you have to have somebody else that’s going to create that tension. Maybe it’s Kyrie?”