Kyrie Irving Blames Media For Creating Drama Between Him and LeBron James After Leaving Cleveland Cavaliers
Basketball star Kyrie Irving is blaming the media for fabricating drama between him and former teammate LeBron James.
Speaking on Monday’s episode of I Am Athlete he blamed the media for running with the idea that he had asked to be traded from the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2017 as a bid to get away from James.
He said, “We gotta be cool as brothers, whether we’re playing together or whether we’re not playing together. We have to protect one another because it will seep into family life where people will really think that we don’t like each other based on us not being able to play together anymore. You know what I mean? ‘You asked for a trade, so you must hate that dude.’ — That’s not true. So I had to defend myself. He had to defend himself. Right. And it was like, I’m trying to put that to bed so I could continue to build my own legacy, but I’m continuously reminded over and over again.”
“Right,” agreed football player LeSean McCoy
“‘Yo, you left bro. How could you do that?’ You got his fan base. You got my fan base. You got team fan bases going at it,” he continued. “I asked for a trade because I was looking for something different. I was a man of my word. When I went to the organization, I sat the big, the higher ups down and said, look, I know y’all have future plans. Tell me right now. They told me their future plans. I said, ‘look, I’m not — this isn’t for me.'”
“That’s right,” McCoy agreed.
Irving continued, “Didn’t get a chance to talk to LeBron before the media ended up coming out and saying that I asked for a trade.”
He then recounted how the news broke regarding his request to be traded from Cleveland while he was on a brand tour with Nike in China.
“I’m not even on American soil right now,” Irving described. “So I can’t even get on to defend myself. So now I see all these reports and you know, 12 hours ahead. So I’m staying up 4:00 AM like what’s being reported now. — I didn’t have a sense of how to manage that when all the media is, is coming after me.”
“I had the conversation that needed to be had with the organization,” Irving clarified. “And then I was gonna have it with LeBron. But as soon as I got over to China, boom, now it’s, LeBron’s attempted to do this and Kyrie’s saying this about this and that’s not the, that’s not the image I want to create.”
“Me and him never had beef like that,” Irving concluded.
Listen above via I Am Athlete.
