Nets star Kyrie Irving doesn’t believe it’s a fair narrative that his decision not to be vaccinated – and what that ultimately cost him – makes him an unreliable teammate.
Yet that’s how the chips fell in contract negotiations and it – his status as unvaccinated in a city that didn’t create a vaccine exemption for pro athletes until the final weeks of the regular season – ultimately decided his fate.
“At the end of the season, we started to have some (conversations) that I felt were going in the right direction,” the seven-time All-Star said from the lectern at the HSS Training Center on Monday. “But it just didn’t end up well going into free agency, and what that looked like for the long-term, and I understood all the Nets’ points, and I respected it and I honored it, (but) I didn’t appreciate how me being vaccinated all of a sudden came to be a stigma within my career that I don’t want to play, or I’m willing to give up everything to be a voice for the voiceless. And which I will stand on here and say that, that wasn’t the only intent that I had, was to be the voice of the voiceless: It was to stand on something that was going to be bigger than myself.”
