Kyrie Irving really did sign up for a rare opportunity in the summer of 2019. The Knicks had dealt in the currency of dysfunction and defeat for so long, leaving the market wide open for a charismatic baller to take it by the throat. 

New Yorkers are always willing to fall madly in love with local point guards who know how to weave through traffic, and Irving was all of that. He was raised in New Jersey and taught the city game by a father raised in the South Bronx projects. Kyrie had arrived in Brooklyn with the competitive arrogance that defines both sides of the George Washington Bridge. 

Bob Cousy, son of Manhattan and Queens and the founding father of the creative playmaker, would tell The Post that Irving was one of the five best point guards of his lifetime (He was 92 when he said it). 

“A talent like Kyrie comes along once every 20-25 years,” Cousy raved. “It is so rare that when you acquire it, you don’t let it go.” 

And yet if the Brooklyn Nets could field a competitive team without him, a team that wouldn’t compel Kevin Durant to throw up his hands again and cry uncle, that’s exactly what they would do — let him go. People keep trying to figure out what and who Irving is when this simple definition is staring them right in the face: 

NOT. WORTH. THE. TROUBLE. 

With his behavior, Irving has wasted so much of his prime as a player and tainted so much of his platform as a change agent. He’s made it awfully hard to see all the noble social causes he’s supported with his money and time. He’s made it awfully hard to see him as the same winner who nailed a Game 7 shot over Steph Curry to help LeBron James to another title. 

At 30, Irving is already a washed-out asset. 

That’s the great shame of Irving’s time in Brooklyn, elevated to DEFCON 1 levels when he shared with his 22 million social media followers an Amazon link to a film that barfs out a river of anti-Semitic bile. Irving made this move a couple of months after notarizing an Alex Jones video on an alleged “New World Order” that the Anti-Defamation League describes as a right-wing conspiracy theory claiming that a secret network of globalists is trying to sicken, disarm and enslave Americans. 

Irving called that Jones trash “true,” and pledged to weather the sentiments of Nets owner Joe Tsai and the league on the subject of hate speech. He swore, “I’m not going to stand down on anything I believe in,” before he stood down Sunday by deleting his offending tweet. 

This ugliness left the 1-5 Nets in their default state of disarray before they won Monday night’s rematch against Indiana by a 116-109 count. Given that Tsai had written of Irving’s latest unforced error, “This is bigger than basketball,” it seemed the point guard would at least be suspended for a few games to ponder the pain he caused. 

But no, he was back in the Nets’ starting lineup, ready to score 28 points with relative ease. Coach Steve Nash said the Nets were going to talk internally and emerge “with more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation.” 

Problem is, there’s only one side of this situation and absolutely nothing to debate. Asked if the Nets were considering any discipline for Irving, Nash repeated that he’d been too busy coaching to be fully engaged in those in-house talks. Asked if anyone inside the organization had asked Irving to delete his tweet, Nash responded: “I’m not sure about that. I didn’t. I know there’s a process in place, so I allowed that process to take place.” 

What process needs to unfold before Irving is penalized for an indefensible act? 

“They should not keep a guy like that around,” Aaron Jungreis, a 52-year-old season-ticket holder who was among the courtside fans wearing “Fight Antisemitism” T-shirts, told The Post. Jungreis said he is “definitely” considering the possibility of canceling his season tickets. 

“A lot of people are going to cancel, a lot of people,” he said. “I think they have to discipline him in some way.” 

The Canarsie-born Jungreis said that Irving told the fans in the shirts he appreciated them, but that he said it sarcastically. 

“We told him we love him anyway, even though we know he hates us,” Jungreis said. 

Irving wasn’t made available to the news media to further discuss his claims that he is not anti-Semitic and that he embraces all religions, words that don’t match up with his deeds. Meanwhile, his former AAU coach, Sandy Pyonin, a Jewish man who has worked with more than three dozen NBA players, reported that Irving had never exhibited any anti-Semitic tendencies, that the player had been especially kind to young Orthodox campers, and that Irving’s longtime best friend coaches at a New Jersey Hebrew academy with a mission statement that reads, in part, “to love and serve the Jewish People, and to forge a lifelong bond with the Land and State of Israel.” 

Said Pyonin: “I think it’s a bad rap.” 

If so, Kyrie Irving gave himself that rap. He could have been a king of kings in this town, and instead made a mockery of the very thought.