Members of Inside the NBA on TNT studio and broadcast team offered their thoughts to the situation involving Kyrie Irving on Tuesday night.
Irving has found himself in hot water over a since-deleted tweet about an antisemitic movie.
On TNT’s pregame show, both Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley offered their thoughts on Irving. Shaq said Irving just displays just a general lack of awareness of what he puts out on social media.
“Some people are conscious, some people are not. I can tell he’s not conscious, he doesn’t really care about what’s going on,” Shaq said. “But us, I know that the game that we used to love and promote it brings people together. And it hurts me sometimes when we have to sit up here and talk about stuff that divides the game. Now we gotta answer for what this idiot has done.”
Barkley thinks it’s wild that the league didn’t discipline him for the tweet sooner.
“I think (the NBA) should have been suspended him,” Barkley said. “I think (NBA commissioner Adam Silver) should have suspended him. First of all, Adam is Jewish — you can’t take my $40 million and insult my religion. You gonna insult me, you have the right, but I have the right to say, ‘You can’t take my $40 million and insult my religion.’”
“We’ve suspended people and fined people who have made homophobic slurs,” Barkley added. “And that was the right thing to do. If you insult the black community, you should be suspended or fined heavily.”
On the Nets/Bulls game broadcast on TNT, Reggie Miller said it was interesting how the NBA as a community didn’t collectively stand up against what Irving put out there compared to incidents that were racial in nature involving former Clippers owner Donald Sterling and soon to be ex-Suns owner Robert Sarver.
“When Donald Sterling stepped in it, when Robert Sarver just recently stepped in it, our voices in the basketball community and our players were vocally strong in some type of discipline being handed down — or be gone,” Miller said. “The players have dropped the ball on this case when it’s been one of their own. It’s been crickets.
“And it’s disappointing, because this league has been built on the shoulders of the players being advocates,” he added. “Right is right and wrong is wrong. And if you’re gonna call out owners, and rightfully so, then you’ve got to call out players as well. You can’t go silent in terms of this for Kyrie Irving. I want to hear the players and their strong opinions as well, just as we heard about Robert Sarver and Donald Sterling.”
Some in sports media offered their reaction to Miller’s comments.
The Nets are looking into some kind of discipline on Irving, but Barkley felt like it’s too late. The NBA Players Association released a statement on the situation but didn’t refer to Irving by name.
“Antisemitism has no place in our society. The NBPA is focused on creating an environment where everyone is accepted,” the statement said. “We are committed to helping players fully understand that certain words can lead to hateful ideologies being spread. We will continue to work on identifying and combating all hate speech whenever it arises.”
