For four of Kyrie Irving’s most formative basketball years, when the young teenager was honing the talent that would lead to him being the 2011 No. 1 NBA draft selection, he was picked up for practice every day by a Jewish man named Sandy Pyonin. Pyonin, a famed coach and gym teacher at a Hebrew day school in Irving’s hometown of West Orange, would shuttle Irving to the gym at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in Union — a dingy spot where the floor was well-worn and mezuzahs were affixed to the doors. In that weathered gym with Hebrew on the walls, Pyonin, his curly mop of …
