Kyrie Irving won’t take accountability for promoting an antisemitic film and book in a now-deleted tweet. He proved that much in a contentious press conference on Saturday when pressed on why he was trafficking in such harmful tropes.
On Monday night he started for the Nets again and provided plenty of highlights for the team to tweet out, but Brooklyn declined to make him available to reporters after the game. Maybe Irving didn’t want to talk. Maybe Brooklyn was trying to shield its star from himself.
So what does that make the NBA at a time when antisemitic incidents are occurring at record levels?
A passive bystander? A reluctant enabler?
I’m not going to rehash the vile and outright nonsense spewing from the mouth and social media accounts of the Nets point guard. USA Today’s Dan Wolken has an insightful breakdown of why Irving’s actions were so harmful and where they stem from.
Those ideas don’t deserve any more oxygen than they’ve already received. Kyrie says he’s not antisemitic. His actions beg to differ. So there’s no need to argue the intent or impact behind them.
What is worth talking about is a National Basketball Association that is woefully unprepared to deal with hate speech—and even less so when it’s coming from one of the league’s most well-known stars.
The current NBA infrastructure is not meant to handle these situations. Not one full day after the league, the Nets, and team owner Joe Tsai condemned Irving’s promotion of an antisemitic film, Irving was on the dais, facing reporters, and doubling down on the very ideas the NBA called “unacceptable”.
Which is to say the NBA did find the comments acceptable. Because Irving didn’t miss a game after his posts went up. And the league has remained silent for 48 hours and counting since the guard lashed out at reporters trying to clarify why he promoted the film.
The NBA issued the following statement: pic.twitter.com/vuTVhEegeh
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) October 29, 2022
It’s impossible to take a response from the NBA seriously when the league refuses to call out by name the player responsible for spreading antisemitic ideas.
The same goes for the Nets—who also put out a statement that refused to call out Irving by name. It did, however, claim zero tolerance for the promotion of hate speech:
“The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have no tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech. We believe that in these situations, our first action must be open, honest dialogue. We thank those, including the ADL [Anti-Defamation League], who have been supportive during this time.”
(It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that only hours after announcing it parted ways with head coach Steve Nash on Monday, Brooklyn reportedly hired disgraced Celtics coach Ime Udoka to take over not even two months after Boston suspended him for an improper relationship with a subordinate that allegedly led to workplace harassment. These are the Nets’ priorities, it seems.)
Nike, which produces Irving’s signature sneaker, put out a similarly toothless statement.
What they all have in common is that they’re filled with empty words and no consequences. A zero-tolerance policy that does not include any actions is, by definition, tolerance. By putting Kyrie back in front of reporters on Saturday — without giving him proper education, and while he’s representing a city and a borough with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world — is tolerance of the ideas he’s espousing.
It’s moral cowardice from a league that has most recently proven it’ll take necessary steps to combat toxicity only when key sponsors demand it. Commissioner Adam Silver’s tenure began with him forcing a repugnant Donald Sterling to sell the Clippers. But what was once a legacy-defining moment is in danger of becoming an outlier on his resume, overshadowed by his capitulations to the Chinese government in the wake of Daryl Morey’s support of a democratic Hong Kong and his initial refusal to oust Robert Sarver until advertisers made the decision for him.
Lo and behold, the pushback Irving received from the press only emboldened him.
“I’m not going to stand down on anything that I believe in,” Irving said Saturday. “I’m only going to get stronger because I’m not alone. I have a whole army around me.”
Keep in mind, Irving is a multi-millionaire with endless resources. If he really wanted to educate himself on the topic, he could do so in numerous ways. Instead he chose to look up a movie on Amazon Prime filled with blatantly fictitious quotes attributed to Hitler and accept it as fact. This reeks of someone wanting to sound educated on religious history without the willingness to do any of the work required to actually learn about it.
So now the NBA is backed into a predictable corner. It may very well likely suspend or fine Irving after Saturday’s outburst—though letting him play on Monday remains an awful look, especially as courtside fans demonstrated against Irving’s actions. The league may have him go through some type of training or pair him up with a Holocaust museum to try to get through to him. I’m not optimistic.
Irving made clear during his dogwhistle back-and-forth with reporters that he’s the victim here. He had the gall to claim media outlets were “dehumanizing” him while he defended sharing a film loaded with misinformed attacks on Jews to his millions of followers on social media.
Perhaps it was for the best he didn’t meet with reporters postgame on Monday, but if he’s unfit to speak to his actions, he’s certainly unfit to play.
Marks: “The last post game meeting didn’t go well, but we’re not trying to cover this up.”
Says Irving will address this again soon.
— Bobby Manning (@RealBobManning) November 1, 2022
Suspend him now? Maybe, but at this point the NBA better have a plan for if and when Irving cries out that he’s being silenced as a result.
Even more concerning is the fact Kyrie serves as a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association. He doesn’t just have the backing of the union — he is a major cog in it.
The NBA wants to pretend this is just a public relations problem. It wants to use the same cycle of condemn, apologize and force atonement from its stars that you’d typically see after a player gets too many ejections. The NBA wants to believe this is a problem that will just go away with time.
The league forgets that these antisemitic tropes have been around for hundreds of years and don’t appear to be going anywhere. So far it doesn’t seem up to the task of addressing it.
