Kyrie Irving lit a flame. The NBA, top to bottom, watched the fire spread.

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Kyrie Irving lit a flame. The NBA, top to bottom, watched the fire spread.

Perspective by Candace Buckner
Columnist
November 6, 2022 at 5:20 a.m. EST

While the NBA was engulfed in an unquenchable controversy, set by the league’s favorite arsonist, who would prefer to watch it all go down in flames, the most empowered professional athletes in the world sat and watched.

In the days after Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to a propagandist film heavy with antisemitic themes, his outspoken peers said nothing. While players could have stepped up and shown how to be allies, the very kind they expected from their White coaches and peers in 2020, they did nothing.

Their collective silence, coupled with their union’s statement (52 toothless words from the National Basketball Players Association), revealed the worst about empowerment and exclusivity run amok. And we have seen this problem through all walks of life. The thin blue line that will protect even a thug simply because he wears a badge. The politicians who would stick with their party’s talking points rather than show basic human sympathy for violence enacted on an elderly victim. And now, of course, the band of brothers who will fight together against racial injustice and hate speech as long as the perpetrator isn’t one of their own.

Irving is his own molotov cocktail, infused with unmerited hubris and crippling ignorance. And he hurled himself directly at the league. He created the worst kind of PR that allowed years of goodwill to be scorched by hypocrisy.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/06/kyrie-irving-nba-kevin-durant/

Non-paywalled link: https://wapo.st/3E9w8vA

[True Dough]

1. Yeah, it was a shameful display

Charles Barkley was much more vocal than any league executives or active players. The players union tip-toed around it too, never naming Irving as being out of line. A bad look all around.

[SallyHemmings]

2. He is a disgrace.

The league’s slow response was just terrible.

He is toxic waste in the locker room. I sure wouldn’t want him as a teammate.

[Raven123]

4. Best trade the Cavs made was the one that sent him to the Celtics.

Didn’t get much back, in terms of talent, but what they unloaded was worth it.

[Paladin]

3. To hell with Kyrie Irving.

Same for anybody else, stupid enough to deal in antisemitism.

[certainot]

5. he's a known idiot and this event is minor compared with RW radio's dependence on colleges and pro

athletics. hundreds of racist white supremacist misogynist anti semitic radio stations all over the country depend on hundreds of college and pro teams to keep helping them attract advertisers to pay for their republican bigotry

here's a list of 87 universities that broadcast sports on/support 260 ex limbaugh stations and that's just a small part of it.

[nycbos]

6. I feel like the Kyrie situation is a no win situation for Jews like myself.

We lose by engaging it because it amplifies the already a large audience he has on his disposal due to social media. But we also lose by ignoring it because history has showed us ignoring open bigotry comes with very negative consequences.


On another subject, some figures in the sports world I think have nailed the problem with Kyrie.


Shannon Sharpe said when Kyrie started with his "flat earth stuff" that he was just like a "preacher outside a grocery store." And we just blow him off. But all of a sudden he has a congregation he's spewing the foolishness, which leads to other people spreading the foolishness.

Stephen A Smith said Kyrie thinks he's just so much smarter than everyone else. As sarcastically put it "we're not absorbing the brilliance of him."

&t=105s

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Stephen A Is Close To Being Right

Irving's problem isn't merely that he thinks he's the smartest guy in the room.
It's that he thinks he's the ONLY smart one in the room.
That's much worse.
Not only is he not as smart as he thinks he is, he thinks everyone else is stupid.