NBA Star Index: Kyrie Irving in his bag, Stephen Curry heating up and Trae Young deserves an apology

Also, Damian Lillard is up to his old tricks

Welcome back to the NBA Star Index -- a weekly gauge of the players who are most controlling the buzz around the league. Reminder: Inclusion on this list isn't necessarily a good thing. It simply means that you're capturing the NBA world's attention. Also, this is not a ranking. The players listed are in no particular order as it pertains to the buzz they're generating. This column will run every week through the end of the regular season. 

Before the season started, Kyrie Irving said he was going to let his play do the talking. It did. He was brilliant. Then he stopped playing. Took a mental health hiatus. Now he's back, and his game is speaking volumes again. Say what you want about Kyrie, but he is a magical basketball player, and he's having the best season of his career so far. 

Irving was deep in his bag in a win over the Clippers on Tuesday, finishing with 39 points on 15-of-23 shooting, including 6 of 8 from 3. Over his last four games, Irving is shooting a blistering 60 percent from the field (46 of 76). Since returning to the lineup on Jan. 18, he's averaging better than 29 points and five assists on 56 percent shooting, including 47.6 percent from 3. 

For the season, he's fifth in the league in scoring, and he's well on pace for a 50-40-90 campaign at 53.5 percent from the field, 44.7 percent from 3 and 94.8 from the free-throw line. The popular hot take that Irving, Kevin Durant and James Harden weren't going to be able to share one basketball has been immediately extinguished. The Nets are scoring 122.1 points per 100 possessions when their Big Three share the floor, per Cleaning the Glass, which would rank as the best mark in the league, and even that number doesn't feel like it totally reflects just how dominant they've looked. 

For Irving's part, the clarity of his role as a straight bucket-getter is bringing out the best in him, just as it did alongside LeBron James in Cleveland. Harden is the "point guard" for whatever that distinction is worth these days, Durant is off ball, and Irving has settled right in between as a knock-down shooter when his co-stars draw the attention and a brutally efficient one-on-one scorer when it's his turn to create, whether via isolation or pick-and-roll. 

Entering play on Thursday, Irving is posting 1.07 points per possession as a pick-and-roll scorer (87th percentile), 1.35 PPP as an isolation scorer (94th percentile) and 1.34 PPP as a spot-up shooter (91st percentile), per Synergy. Irving is also in the 95th percentile as a jump-shooter (it's almost a shock when he misses a shot these days), and the 98th percentile (1.42 PPP) when those shots come off the dribble, a small sample of which can be seen below. 

You can talk about Stephen Curry or Harden or Kawhi Leonard or Kevin Durant or even LeBron James all you want, but for my money, there is no better shot creator off the dribble in the league than Irving. He is break-dancer gifted with the rock, and it's crazy to think he might be the third-best player on his own team, though right now it's up for debate whether he or Harden is No. 2 on the hierarchy. 

It doesn't matter. Either way, there have never been three better scorers on one team in NBA history. At this point, that feels indisputable. As does the notion that the Nets, at this point, have to be considered the clear favorite to come out of the East, their defensive issues notwithstanding. 

After a rough shooting start to the season by his standards, Curry has hit just under 53 percent of his 3-pointers over his last five games, and 49 percent over this last eight games. Trace it back over his last 10 games, and Curry is shooting 46.4 percent from 3 on over 11 attempts a game, a positively bonkers level of production. Sixth in the league in scoring, Curry is now up to 41.4 percent from 3 for the season and the world is back in order. 

On Tuesday, Curry hit the Celtics for 39 points, 11 rebounds, eight assists and three steals on 57 percent shooting, including 7 of 14 from downtown. It wasn't enough. The Celtics blitzed Golden State -- which was without James Wiseman, and Kevon Looney for the second half -- on the boards, and they slowed Curry down just enough during a few stretches by springing a zone defense. 

The adjustment somewhat neutralized Curry's off-ball movement with a defender always occupying his preferred areas, often on the high side of screens, and ready to jump out on the catch, rather than relying solely on multiple defenders chasing from behind, passing the baton as they frantically chart his entire course. 

Also, Kelly Oubre Jr. was minus-25 in a game the Warriors lost by four points. It is impossible to overstate how bad Oubre has been for the Warriors, but Curry -- who entering Thursday is tied with Bradley Beal for the most total points in the league this season, and who also has the most total 3-pointers made (96) in the league -- is doing his best to keep them afloat at 11-10, good enough for ninth in the West. 

A little more than two weeks ago, I wrote a story with the following headline: "Trae Young's ill-advised 3-pointer tells a larger tale: An average shooter who thinks he's Steph Curry." It did not go over well. 

A little background: I was an editor at CBS Sports for seven years before I moved over to the writing side, and as an editor I was largely inactive on Twitter. Even now I'm a vanilla participant. More experienced, and certainly better, Tweeters know that to argue every single disagreeing avatar is the surest route to insanity. But I was defensive, and I went to the mattresses on this one. I spent days countering every counter. I went on Atlanta radio and re-litigated the case. By my insignificant standards, this was the most backlash I've ever encountered. 

And I will admit, it was deserved. The headline was inflammatory and the article was unbalanced. I spent 90 percent of the piece raking Young's shot selection and sheer shooting audacity relative to his actual shooting success to this point in his career, and 10 percent of the article talking about what a wonderfully talented, in some ways genius, offensive player Young has proven to be. That calculus could've, and should've, been flipped.  

That's not to say the point of the article wasn't accurate or that it still doesn't stand. It was, and it does. Young has been a statistically average 3-point shooter through his first two NBA seasons, he was a statistically average shooter during his one college season, and at the time I wrote the article, he was shooting well under 30 percent from 3 this season and had just launched what was, by any definition, a wildly ill-advised potential game-winning shot against the Blazers -- a one-man-fast-break, pull-up 30-footer, with the Hawks only trailing by two, with 23 seconds still on the clock, before any of his teammates had crossed half court, on a night when he wound up 1 of 9 from long range. 

I will repeat: In 2015-16, Stephen Curry, the greatest shooter in history who had the single-greatest shooting season ever by hitting 402 3-pointers at a 45 percent clip, attempted just 26 shots from 30-34 feet, per NBA.com. He made a staggering 57 percent of them. Meanwhile, Young fired 81 shots from 30-34 feet last season, making 33 percent of them. He fired 64 as a rookie, making 35 percent. There is just no world in which Young, a 34 percent career 3-point shooter, has earned the right to jack up 30-34 foot shots at three times the rate of Stephen Curry.

What I didn't say, and what I should have said, is that Young has reigned himself in this season in attempting over three fewer 3-pointers per game than he did last season. To be clear, the answer isn't necessarily for Young to cut his volume. He most certainly is a talented shooter -- even if that talent has been undermined by shot selection, and hasn't translated to anything but average percentages to date -- and the threat of his range impacts his own shot creation and his team's spacing in ways a box score can't capture. 

But Young is not taking as many early clock 3s, before anyone else has touched the ball. He's not firing up quite so many parking-lot bombs, more often choosing the disciplined route of extending possessions, prioritizing getting into the lane, which he can do pretty much at will. Ultimately, he's not turning 1-of-4 nights into 1-of-9 nights by trying to gun his way out of a bad game, making it a worse game in the process of potentially alienating his new stable of capable teammates. 

Over his last nine outings, Young hasn't once shot worse than 37 percent from 3 in a single game in which he attempted at least five triples. In other words, when he's been hot -- like when he went 8 for 12 from 3 en route to 43 points against the Timberwolves, or when he went 5 for 9 from deep for 41 points against the Wizards -- he's lengthened his own leash. But when he's not hot, rather than forcing his shot, he's seeking other avenues of offense, plenty of which are at his disposal. That's the good stuff. 

All told, since I wrote that article, Young is averaging 31.8 points and 9.6 assists. He's shooting 48 percent from 3 on over seven attempts a game. The Hawks are plus-7.6 during his minutes. For the season, Young is now over 36 percent from 3. This, again, is a pretty average mark for a starting NBA point guard, let alone an All-Star point guard, but given his volume and the impact he has on spacing and flow, 36 percent is more than acceptable if he's not taking too many ill-advised shots, which, again, he hasn't been. 

He has, in fact, been pretty much amazing the last two-plus weeks and will likely make his second straight All-Star team at this rate. Trae Young is a brilliant basketball player. There has, to this point, also been a gap between the perception and reality of his shooting. Both of these things can be true, but they should be analyzed with proper balance and full context, just as Luka Doncic's significant 3-point-shooting struggles shouldn't disproportionately overshadow his overall greatness and the massive responsibility he shoulders. Our Jasmyn Wimbish did it much better than me in this fairly written piece regarding Luka and the Mavs. I didn't give Trae, a player I have pretty much adored from the first time I saw him in summer league, that same respect. That was my mistake, and this is my correction. 

Lillard hit one of the wildest game-winners you'll ever see to stun the Bulls on Saturday, picking up the scraps of a jump ball before launching into a falling-out-of-bounds buzzer-beater:

DAMIAN LILLARD GAME WINNER. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/o5TtiIwW6g

— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) January 31, 2021

Three nights later, he reminded the Wizards what time it was when he banged a 28-foot step-back for the exclamation point on a 132-121 overtime victory:

Damian Lillard had to check the clock ⌚️

(via @trailblazers) pic.twitter.com/8mdT76VblC

— Dime (@DimeUPROXX) February 3, 2021

With CJ McCollum, Jusuf Nurkic and Zach Collins all out for extended periods, Lillard is doing everything in his power to keep the Blazers in the playoff picture long enough for those guys to come back. Entering Thursday, the Blazers are 11-9, seventh in the West.