Kyrie Irving sure is ambitious

Out of the four major sports, basketball may be the most difficult to become a professional in. Ignoring the obvious (height requirements), it is simply a numbers game - 12 active spots per team times 30 teams in the league means that at any given time there are just 360 NBA players (one of every 7,600 high school basketball players reaches the NBA).

Safe to say, if you are a high school player aspiring to make the league, you might want to make sure you have a back-up plan in case you end up being one of the other 7,599.

Kyrie Irving does.

Journalism.

You think he knows this industry isn't much better than trying to make the league?

All kidding aside, Irving seems like he has things pretty well figured out. On the court, he is one of the best point guard prospects in the class of 2010 (Rivals has him as #14 overall, whereas Scout will be sliding him into the top 5 come their post-summer rankings) and is being recruited by, well, everyone.

The fact that he averaged 21 and 4 dimes while winning MVP honors in the Nike Global Challenge last week only made college coaches salivate more.

The biggest question mark with Irving right now is whether or not he can be a pure PG. Doubters point to his high scoring numbers, saying that he shoots the ball too much to be a great collegiate, and possibly NBA, leading man.

Is that question mark fair?

Think about it - a general rule of thumb in basketball is that you want your best player, regardless of position, to get the most shots. If Irving really is one of the top five seniors in the country, wouldn't it make sense that he will be the best player on his team (and on the court) just about every time he plays? In fact, Kevin Boyle, his head coach at New Jersey basketball powerhouse St. Anthony's, is so enamored with Irving's talent that he said the PG would be as good as any guard from NJ, including schoolboy legends DaJuan Wagner and Bobby Hurley.

Back to the point, if Irving is truly that good, wouldn't you want the ball in his hands as much as possible, even if it means he shoots more than you would like? Isn't the job of a point guard to create points, regardless of who gets the buckets?

Yes, it is.

But there is more to being a point guard than just the ability to make a play. The best are, excuse the cliche, an extension of the coach on the floor. Not only do they have to know the offense and the defense inside and out, they need to have a feel for how each player on the floor is performing and be able to recognize exploitable tendencies in your opponent's gameplan.

In simpler terms, point guards need to be intelligent.

Which brings me back to the writing.

In order to be a writer, you need to have some smarts. Whether it is script writing, covering a beat for a pro team, writing columns for the business section, or writing a novel, in order to be successful you need to be able to string together words in a concise and clever, yet intelligible manner.

That takes smarts.

So does running the point for Duke, or Kentucky, or Indiana, or wherever Irving ends up.