Source: Boston Globe / Getty
Streaming has turned from being a way for Gen Z to interact with their favorite influencers to now professional athletes getting some things off their chest.
While enjoying his last few weeks of the offseason, Kyrie Irving hopped on a stream to finally break down his drama-filled stint with the Brooklyn Nets.
It began at the start of the 2021-22 season, when Irving was benched after refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine and expressing a desire to be traded.
“Even the people that I was in business with were pro-vaccine,” the Dallas Mavericks guard said. “I’m like, okay, look, that’s fine, but just leave me the (expletive) out of this and let me go somewhere,” he said. “I even told the Nets to release me. I said, ‘Yo, can you please just release me?’ And, obviously, the money situation — different situation, I’m f-cking Kyrie. I say that very aware of my position, but they weren’t just going to let me rock out.”
But before that, when he first signed with the Nets in 2019, he didn’t think the team actually sought him out and just saw him as a way of getting Kevin Durant by any means possible.
“I didn’t meet with the front office one time. I didn’t meet with the GM one time. The assistant GM one time. Literally, when I look back at that decision, I’m like, man, I should have taken some more time to delegate, figure out what’s best for me…Brooklyn, I wish that we had gotten a chance to get to know them beforehand. Because they weren’t f-cking with me like that…And that’s just me. That’s my perspective. That’s my perspective. Now, did they want me on the team? Sure. You can say that. But Kenny Atkinson wasn’t f-cking with me like that, bro. The Nets didn’t want me like that. They wanted KD.”
Another major part of that Big Three in Brooklyn was James Harden, who only played 80 games during his two-year tenure. However, it was his departure to the 76ers that marked the beginning of the end of the experiment, and Irving says their relationship was so fractured that he didn’t know he was leaving.
“I was just telling him ‘we’re about to win championships,’ then the next day he asked for a trade. It shocked me. I understood, though,” he said.
Irving’s unfiltered venting started to get a little too real, and his agent reportedly contacted him mid-stream to tell him he was revealing too much of the NBA’s inner workings.
The big three of KD, Irving, and Harden showed promise, but with numerous factors working against them, they managed to play only 16 games together, going 13-3.
See social media’s response to Irving’s stream below.