Kyrie Irving sliced through the Warriors by going into Uncle Drew mode

Some performances, you just can’t watch alone. You need to be around friends. You need people with you when Kyrie Irving does something so incredible that it seems almost unreal. You need to affirm that actually happened, that you’re not hallucinating from the exhaustion that comes from watching late West Coast games. Otherwise, you’ll be cursing alone after every shot and questioning your own reality.

Uncle Drew is a baller. He said it himself and it’s so very true: he gets buckets. That’s never been in question. At just 24, he’s one of the league’s best finishers around the rim and possesses a lightning-quick handle.

But it is one thing to know that fact and another to watch him at his full powers. He causes you to feel different things in the moment when he’s scorching whatever defense the Golden State Warriors threw at him in a finals elimination game. There’s nothing comparable to the experience of seeing him score as if he was playing his own individual game of H.O.R.S.E.

To be fair, this game didn’t come out of nowhere. This is his third finals game in a row with 30-plus points. They’ve come after a disappointing first two showings in the series, during which his worst traits of over-dribbling, shot selection and invisibility in other areas were on display. Something had to change.

Yet, that change couldn’t transform Irving into someone new, because that was part of the problem. He was stuck between doing what he knows and trying to give up the ball, which would only serve to quiet his loudest critics at the expense of his game.

In Game 1, Irving shot 22 times en route to a game-high 26 points, but the offense stopped when he got the ball. In Game 2, he was passive and ineffectual, finishing with only 10 points and a lone assist.

Credit the Warriors, who are apt to expose any and all anxieties a player has. Irving was great against the Raptors and Pistons, but the Warriors are so suffocating that he was forced into panic mode in the first game and a fearful lethargy in the second.

The message after those couple of blunders was simple: stay aggressive. Stay true to yourself.

“We need Kyrie to be aggressive,” Tyronn Lue said. “He’s a scorer. He’s a special player. He has the best handle in the NBA, so he’s able to play iso basketball. But he’s got to make quick decisions, and he understands that.”

In other words: Do what you do best, and do it early and often. Look to score, and the passing will come because of that. If that fails, that’s okay, as well. There’s a LeBron James in the waiting who can do that and everything else.

In Game 5, James did everything else, while Irving got buckets. That proved to be a formula that worked wonders.

Irving’s first shot was a three-pointer after James attracted the attention of several defenders. Then, it started. Irving dribbled under Andrew Bogut and finished with an acrobatic reverse layup with his left hand. He drove and pulled up from the short corner with Klay Thompson draped all over him. He grabbed another rebound, stopped and pull up from the three with Thompson sagging off. Shaun Livingston was the next victim via a regular mid-range jumper, created because Livingston was scared of Irving’s ability to drive.

Irving kept on scoring in many different ways. There were more pull-up threes, a lot of mid-range jumpers and disgustingly-difficult layups. Some of those buckets were unbelievable:

But true to the sentiment of staying aggressive, he was able to find teammates for easy buckets when the Warriors converged.

Best of all, most of those plays came early in the shot clock. He made up his mind to attack and he did so without second-guessing himself.

This is not what Kyrie Irving can be, because that’s still to be determined as he ages. This is what he is. This is the best version of his current self, the scoring guard who can take and make the most difficult of shots, against any defender(s), from anywhere on the court.

This is the version of his current self that needs to be nurtured, not changed. The ability to score is what will allow him to create for others. He doesn’t need to stand back and survey the field to be great. He needs to be aggressive and stay aggressive, causing chaos and fear.

Because when he is that way, no one can defend him. When he is this confident, he makes even the best team in basketball look utterly helpless trying to find an answer. Even they must live with Irving putting Harrison Barnes on skates before hitting another mid-range jumper.

Irving had one of the best finals performances of all-time, posting scoring and shooting numbers matched only by the great Wilt Chamberlain. He did it his way, and not his critics’ way. He went out and simply got buckets.