It’s not personal, Brooklyn. I just hate this city, the fans, and everyone in this organization and want to watch them burn out of spite.
The best part of the whole quote is where he says “It’s not personal.”
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t pay that much attention to the NBA these days, but I know who Kyrie Irving is, and when I saw this come up in my news feed, I had to scrunch my brow and just go wow. These are some bombs of words to be flinging out there, and in an age where people are reluctant to burn bridges because the internet has made the world small, everything is basically recorded forever, and people just don’t know when their words can come back to haunt them, Kyrie Irving still gave zero fucks and basically told not just the Brooklyn Nets, the team that he actively plays for and signs his paychecks, but the entire city of Brooklyn, New York, that he hates them and fuck you all.
Personally, I’m not a fan of Kyrie Irving; he’s this enigma of a human being that I feel was blessed with basketball talent, coasted through life, has enjoyed immense success professionally and made a tremendous amount of money, but is still somehow an insufferable asshole who seems to get off on being a contrarian.
However, personal feelings aside, like the title of this post says, I kind of respect the brutal honesty he had no hesitation in letting become a quote. At some point in most peoples’ lives, who hasn’t been furious with an employer before? Whether they cared to admit or not, felt the same kind of feelings towards those jobs, as he felt about the Brooklyn Nets? And on top of the discontent with his employer, in the world of sports, fans are about the most insufferable people on the face of the planet, much less ones from Brooklyn, New York.
I don’t really like Kyrie Irving, but I can only imagine the amount of bullshit he heard from fans on a regular basis. In spite of my personal feelings, I’m not going to deny for a second that the guy is talented as all hell, and is genuinely a generational-level talent; when he actually feels like putting in the effort. He can score, he can pass, and he can take over games by himself; I imagine a lot of the shit he hears on the regular is why he hasn’t delivered a championship for as much money as he’s making, as if sports fans were completely convinced that one guy could actually accomplish victory entirely by themselves.
Michael Jordan couldn’t. Kobe Bryant couldn’t. LeBron James couldn’t. They all had good teams surrounding them, and unfortunately for Kyrie Irving, he hasn’t had the right good team surrounding him since 2016, when he had LeBron James piloting the Cleveland Cavaliers team he was on.
So I kind of get and I do enjoy the unfiltered venom Kyrie Irving had to say about the Nets and the city of Brooklyn itself, and I applaud him for raising the bar for any discontented professional athlete that is demanding to be traded.
Here’s the funny thing about this whole episode though; as quickly as it started, and before I could even write my post about it, it ended. Kyrie Irving was traded to the Dallas Mavericks. Allegedly, the owner of the Nets was willing to trade him to just about anyone with a reasonable package, except for the Lakers, because that was seeming evident to be his desired end destination, and if Irving was saying fuck you to the Nets, the Nets were going to try their best to say fuck you to him too.
The thing is, in all the years that been a sports fan, I’ve seen tons of professional athletes get mad at their teams or their fanbases and demand to be traded. Most of the time it doesn’t always work, because a bluff is called by one party, and it’s usually just someone really trying to have their concerns heard. When it does work, it’s usually dragged out for a while for all trade partners to come to the table and there being some hard balling back-and-forth gamesmanship to see who can “win” the trade, and by the time it happens, all parties are usually exasperated, the contending team that was trying to bolster in the reinforcements has stumbled more from the distraction, and usually the team that’s selling is the long-game winner through draft picks, prospects, or salary relief.
But in less than 48 hours of Kyrie Irving burning down the Brooklyn Bridge, he got his wish and was jettisoned out of Brooklyn. The Nets are getting a direct positional replacement and some potentially valuable draft picks waaayyy down the line, so the jury is way out to see if they’ll “win” the deal, but the Mavericks are getting a very talented player to be a desperately needed #2 option to take the heat off of Luka Doncic.
Because make no mistake, Kyrie Irving is about to go off, now that he’s away from the Nets. He was already scoring nearly 27 points per game as a second option to Kevin Durant, so in the Western Conference, I’d imagine Kyrie will be scoring 30 points a game now, still as a second option to Luka. Because that’s the kind of player I think Irving is, the type who coasts and guards his true talent until he feels it’s necessary to let his balls hang out and go nuts, and now that he’s liberated, not to mention still in the throes of his contract year, I’d wager that the Mavs will most definitely, land a top-3 playoff seed with him in tow now.
What makes me wonder is if Kyrie Irving has inadvertently created a new negotiating tactic, or if not many other professional athletes around are as willing to scorch the earth to the level that he has. The thing is, in spite of the fact that he’s going to be reviled in Brooklyn for a while now, he got exactly what he wanted, and extremely quickly. For any player in sport who wants to get the fuck out of wherever they are in the future, they’ll know precisely what they need to embark on in order to make it happen.
So the next time we see a professional athlete go absolutely off on their team and their city, I think it’s safe to say that it can be coined as pulling a Kyrie, and we know exactly that it’s strategic, but unlike Kyrie, it might actually not be personal.
