Kyrie Irving already noticing void left by Spencer Dinwiddie

Kyrie Irving is arguably the best ball-handler of all time, yet this year he wasn’t expected to be Brooklyn’s soul ball-handler in the starting lineup with Spencer Dinwiddie capable of sharing responsibilities, along with Kevin Durant — with Caris LeVert helping out off the bench and as part of the closing lineup.

Before he partially tore his ACL on Sunday, Dinwiddie was playing facilitator more than anything on the offensive end. Irving has only played one game without Dinwiddie — resting his surgically repaired right shoulder on Monday — but it didn’t take long Brooklyn’s star guard to miss his backcourt mate.

“Losing Spencer was a big, big blow for us,” Irving said on a Zoom call with reporters on Thursday. “Huge, huge blow. Even after the game, just realizing that a lot of the ball-handling duties, a lot of things that I was relying on to have Spence out there in the lineup, we don’t necessarily have for a while. We obviously wish him well as a team and we want him to get healthy to be ready for whatever comes next in this journey. Just little things like that we’re going to miss in Spence. Now, we have to get another group of guys together in terms of finding that synergy to be able to carry on throughout the rest of the games.”

Irving revisited Brooklyn’s loss of Dinwiddie later in his Thursday Zoom call with the media, adding:

“It’s a big blow for us to lose Spence. That’s a huge, huge blow for us. I feel it, and I know other guys feel it, as well,” Irving said. “Everyone likes to say this phrase ‘Next Man Up Mentality,’ but it’s hard to do that when we started off kind of the last few months together. And we’ve played together a certain type of style, and then we have one of our pieces go down. … It’s the tale of the business. Guys get hurt all the time. We have to figure [out] some things that work for the group that we put out there.”