Former Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving recently decided to speak on the cold reaction his new team, the Brooklyn Nets, received when they visited TD Garden in November.
Irving, who wasn’t even at the contest due to a shoulder injury which still has the Australian out, was heartily booed by Celtics fans while being pilloried by the local media for his absence.
Irving’s initial response, a long-winded and at times rambling reply on Instagram added fuel to the fire to an era best left in the past, the fallout of the disappointing 2018-19 Celtics season so much a distraction, the team’s current players requested media stop fixating on the topic.
🎥 @KyrieIrving addresses the media and gives an update on his shoulder injury: pic.twitter.com/SmHSMQUmxD
— Brooklyn Nets (@BrooklynNets) January 4, 2020
Speaking publicly for the first time since that polarizing night, the Duke product struck a different chord, explaining (via Boston.com’s Conor Roche) how he gets why Boston fans reacted the way that they did, noting they “are going to say regardless of whatever they feel.”
“I respect that,” added the Melbourne native.
“I think that I myself kind of fell into that cycle of being emotionally attached to something like that, especially when I’m watching the game at home with my family, much to the fact that it wasn’t about the players on the floor during that day,”
Irving offered on the evening which triggered the Instagram response. “It became about me and where I was and what I was doing,” he continued, adding context to explain why the booing-in-absentia elicited what seemed to be a diatribe against the very concept of sports entertainment itself.
“For basketball to become more about just one individual player, and it’s a team sport, just to justify market value or bringing more fans to the games or justifying why all that stuff happens, so be it. That’s entertainment,” he explained.
A constant — and to the casual fan, perhaps puzzling — feature of the Irving–Celtics divorce is that his former teammates have remained friendly with the now-Net, with even teammates he clashed with at times refusing to cast the blame of last season at the Al-NBA guard’s feet.
The feeling is evidently mutual for Irving, who said of his former teammates, “I’ve got nothing but love for Boston, nothing but love for the journey I had with all those guys.”
Kyrie Irving opens up about the boos and chants he received from Celtics fans https://t.co/8gxWMQW5LI pic.twitter.com/9uGk7JFIQ8
— Boston.com (@BostonDotCom) January 5, 2020
“I appreciate everyone standing up for me and speaking on my behalf and telling it’s not all my fault, it’s not all on him,” he added, alluding to the continued ties with his ex-teammates. I’m a man. I’m able to take criticism.”
“I haven’t taken it well in the past,” Irving admitted, a fact many Boston fans will likely have a hard time forgetting. And considering just how much of an ongoing gut-punch last season was (of which a not-small part was Kyrie’s fault), it’s eminently understandable how those fans feel.
But with some time disengaged from the furor surrounding the dumpster-fire of a season that was 2018-19, it seems the former Celtics floor general has been able to grow as a person.
Perhaps we have as well.
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