Kyrie Irving became important overnight. He spent his first three years in the league doing dazzling work in the dark, crossing up his counterparts in blowout losses nobody watched. Occasionally, by dint of the joyful iridescence of his play, he would grab the attention of League Pass surfers by bombing and swerving his way to a 15-point quarter, but he mostly operated at the fringes of fan and media attention, first because the Cavaliers were tanking, then because they were incompetent.

He felt every bump and hiccup in Tristan Thompson’s development and suffered Dion Waiters’ continued insistence that he and Kyrie were equals. He played with Anthony Bennett, who showed up to the NBA like a standup whose brain had been wiped twenty minutes before the taping of his HBO special, and Anderson Varejao, who was awesome for two months every season before breaking down. And, not for nothing, Kyrie did all this under Byron Scott’s vacant gaze.  If there were two images that summed up Irving’s early days, one was him perfectly judging some improbable lay-in while falling out of bounds and the other was him sitting in the locker room, eyes glazed over with three inches worth of apathy, spitting bromides while in the grip of a depression brought on by yet another seven-game losing streak.

Then LeBron James returned to Cleveland and everything changed. In retrospect, it was always going to be Irving and not Kevin Love who played second banana to LeBron. Big men who don’t go by a single name—Hakeem, Shaq, Kareem—get shunted to one side whenever they play with great guards and wings. Love had to significantly adjust his game in order to fit alongside LeBron, and, really, he has never quite figured it out. Kyrie’s role was legible from day one because he could just go on doing what he already excelled at: scoring on pick and rolls and isolations and nailing the odd catch-and-shoot three. For him, LeBron was more of a help than a burden.

It took a while for Kyrie to realize as much. In their early days together, LeBron made him smoke the whole pack of cigarettes with regard to the showy guard’s penchant for dribble-heavy ballhoggery, but the two now play well together, or at least aren’t stomping each other’s toes to dust anymore. LeBron is the offense’s fulcrum and Irving its wild soloist. There are interludes in every quarter wherein Irving is allowed to dance his defender to death, and the rest of the time, he blends into the team’s flow. And once in awhile, a hot streak comes on and LeBron is happy to hang out in the corner while Kyrie makes the bucket look hula hoop-sized.

If Irving has succeeded in acclimating himself to sharing an offense with LeBron, then he’s struggled a bit in terms of breaking the habits he formed over his three seasons in obscurity. He got away with a lot in those years, because he was carrying sub-NBA-quality teammates and because no one outside Northeast Ohio was paying attention to his faults. His career during the span was a series of gobsmacking highlights, and on nights when he was less than special or outright awful, he was invisible.

These problems have persisted even as the stage Irving plays on has gotten significantly brighter. For instance, he’s never been a good defender, but more damningly, he’s never been an interested one, either. When Irving is committed, he can make his matchup work, but too often, he sticks to screens like he has velcro skin and is easily discouraged from trying to stay in front of quicker guards. Though he doesn’t possess the lateral quickness to be a consistent stopper, it’s jarring to see a player who is so balletic with the ball at his fingertips appear as creakily wooden as Irving does without it. His on-again, off-again defensive effort indicates that he either lacks the conditioning to play both sides of the floor or that he has it in his head that his job isn’t to offer more than a token defensive resistance.

This flightiness extends to other parts of Irving’s game. He’s an adequate passer, but he sometimes tries to drop extravagant dimes and either turns the ball over or delivers the pass a foot wide of his intended target’s shooting pocket. He’s an intelligent cutter but doesn’t seem to like scoring buckets he doesn’t create himself. He has a tendency to freeze out Kevin Love when LeBron isn’t on the court, seeing those spells as opportunities to get his shots rather than do whatever’s best for the team. On the whole, Irving is a magnificent talent occasionally eclipsed by what he won’t do. There is a sense with him that if he could out of his own way, he could find another level.

This is no great crime. Plenty of NBA stars have blind spots that they never glimpse or flaws that can’t be remedied for reasons fans and media don’t understand. Dame Lillard and Kyrie Irving are essentially the same player, but Dame gets all sorts of plaudits due to his Caesar-right-before-the-fall aesthetic and Kyrie catches some side-eye because he’s aloof and LeBron regularly sells him out to the press. It should be said that Irving is averaging 24.3 points and 5.1 assists per game on 48 percent shooting in these playoffs. He’s making 45 percent of his threes. He’s been terrific.

Yet on the eve of the NBA Finals, nobody seems to be talking about Irving asserting himself. The assumption is he’ll get torched by Steph Curry, put up 25 points per game, and not contribute much else. This seems about right, going on past evidence, but it’s also tying a 24-year-old to the cinderblock of his record and tossing him into the river. Kyrie Irving is still relatively new to this arena: he played one game on one leg in last year’s Finals before cracking his kneecap. He has the best handle in the league, an array of fading and twisting jumpers, a knack for finishing among the trees, and 25-foot range. He’s in possession of so many gifts that he seems only occasionally capable of tapping into all at once. He’s a puzzling, frustrating, spectacular player. And in one direction or another, he’s about to make a lot more sense.