Kyrie Irving last spoke to the press a week ago. He was wearing a black baseball cap, which had the words “Journey” and “Reward” stitched on the front; “Reward” was written upside down. The week before, on October 28th, Rolling Stone had published an article describing the contents of a movie, “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” that Irving had posted a link to on Twitter. The rough thesis of the movie is that Black people are the real Israelites, the true chosen people of God, and that Jews have been lying—about their origins, the Holocaust, and the true extent of their influence. At a postgame press conference a day after the article came out, reporters repeatedly asked Irving about the film and about his beliefs, but, rather than disavowing the movie or anti-Semitism, Irving deflected, painting himself as the victim. “Don’t dehumanize me up here,” he told ESPN’s Nick Friedell.
For the next several days, the Nets did not make Irving available to the press, because, the team’s general manager, Sean Marks, said, they didn’t want to “cause more fuss right now.” But, on November 2nd, the team, Irving, and the Anti-Defamation League put out a statement, in which Irving accepted “responsibility” for his tweet’s “negative impact” on the Jewish community, and he and the Nets organization each pledged five hundred thousand dollars to “causes and organizations that work to eradicate hate and intolerance in our communities,” including the A.D.L. The statement noted that Irving didn’t believe that everything in the documentary was true, but it did not go into detail about his views. The Nets had, in essence, written a script for Irving, the same one that so many athletes had followed before him: apologize, listen, donate, educate. All Irving had to do was follow it. The Nets’ hope—their obvious, desperate hope—was that if he just said, “No, I don’t believe Jews are to blame for anti-Black racism,” or “No, I don’t believe Jews are part of a Satanic cult,” or maybe even simply, “I’m sorry,” then the world could pretend that everything was all right, and the team could get back to the ordinary business of playing basketball.
And so, on November 3rd, Irving was asked again about what he had posted. Was he surprised that promoting the film had hurt people? He answered by describing his own pain: the pain of being a Black child in America and learning the truth of slavery, the pain of being a Black man in America and facing racism and oppression. He talked about the power of his self-education. Asked twice if he held anti-Semitic views, he answered, both times, “I cannot be anti-Semitic, if I know where I come from”—an answer that could plausibly be interpreted as an endorsement of the movie’s thesis. “Any label you put on me I’m able to dismiss, because I study,” he said. “I know the Oxford Dictionary.” He added, “I’m just here to continue to expose things that our world continues to put in darkness,” and he called himself “a light, a beacon of light.”
Shortly after these remarks, the Nets announced that they had suspended Irving for at least five games, without pay, for his “failure to disavow antisemitism.” Irving was “currently unfit to be associated with the Brooklyn Nets,” the team said. Shams Charania, of the Athletic, later reported that Irving needed to complete six steps, including sensitivity and anti-Semitism training, before rejoining the team. (The basketball journalist Marc Stein reported, in his Substack newsletter, that the steps may have been set up with the expectation that Irving would not complete them, and then would be released.) The Nets had at last taken the high road, after every other road was blocked.
Joe Tsai, the owner of the Nets, had seemed to do everything he could to avoid suspending Irving. Shortly after the Rolling Stone article ran, Tsai tweeted that he was “disappointed” in Irving’s decision to amplify the film, and hoped to “sit down” with Irving to help him understand why it was so hurtful. Marks, the general manager, also spoke about the importance of meeting with and listening to the A.D.L. It might have been a laudable approach—for all the hand-wringing about the lack of consequences that athletes face, punishments can be beside the point. But it was hard to take the Nets’ efforts to educate Irving seriously, given that the team had been enabling him for years. Irving reportedly ignored Tsai’s texts; it soon became clear that a representative for Irving, and not Irving himself, had agreed to the joint statement with the Nets and the A.D.L. Only after the suspension was announced did Irving apologize, on Instagram.
Irving’s penchant for conspiracy theories has been familiar to N.B.A. fans since at least February, 2017, when, on a podcast, he declared that the Earth is flat. (“I do research on both sides,” he told the Times, the following year.) Tony Kornheiser, of ESPN, later called out Irving and other N.B.A. players for endorsing such conspiracies. “It’s a very small step to becoming a Holocaust denier or a slavery denier,” Kornheiser said. The Nets signed Irving, in 2019, agreeing to pay him $136,490,600 across four years. Why they did it was immediately obvious—he scored fifty points in his team début—but the risks involved were quickly apparent, too, as was the team’s leniency. During the pandemic, Irving took time away from the court for mental-health reasons, and then was videotaped maskless at an indoor party, breaking COVID-safety protocols. He refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, which, at the start of the 2021-22 season, made him ineligible to play Brooklyn home games, owing to New York City’s vaccination requirements. The Nets announced that Irving would not join them for away games, either—the team was not interested in having part-time members, the Nets said. Then, after several of Irving’s teammates were ruled ineligible to play due to injuries and COVID-19 protocols, the organization backtracked, and allowed Irving to compete on the road.
In the playoffs that season, the Nets were swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round. Afterward, Irving said that he and Kevin Durant, the Nets superstar, were “managing this franchise together alongside” Tsai and Marks. That raised some eyebrows, but given the events of the previous two years it was hard to argue with him. (Among other maneuvers, the team had signed DeAndre Jordan, a friend of Irving’s and Durant’s, to a four-year, forty-million-dollar contract, even though his best days were behind him and the Nets had better, younger players at his position.) During the summer, the team declined to give Irving the long and lucrative contract extension that he reportedly sought. But it was clear that the team was in a win-now mode, and that it needed Irving, or at least thought it did.
The Nets had other issues to contend with. They were planning the exit of the team’s coach, Steve Nash, and announced it in the midst of the Irving controversy. Shams Charania soon reported that the Nets were planning to replace him with Ime Udoka, who is currently serving a yearlong suspension as head coach of the Boston Celtics, for breaking workplace rules; his misdeeds apparently included speaking disrespectfully to a female staffer. When asked what the team was looking for in a new coach, Marks answered, “Poise, charisma, accountability.” On Sunday, Marc Stein reported that “strong voices” were urging the Nets to reconsider the decision to hire Udoka. On Wednesday, the team announced that it had given Jacque Vaughn, a Nets assistant coach who was serving as interim head coach, the job.
Kevin Durant evidently learned about Nash’s firing from the television. He was taking a nap, he later said, with his TV tuned to ESPN, and saw the news when he woke up. He was “shocked,” he told reporters, later that night. This was somewhat hard to believe, given that Nash’s departure had seemed inevitable for days, if not weeks or even months—and that Durant himself had reportedly told Tsai, during the summer, that if Nash and Marks weren’t fired, then the Nets would have to trade him. A few weeks later, Durant backed down from the demand, but it was hard to imagine that such a public breach of faith could be repaired. After all, Nash had supposedly been hired with Durant’s support.
The Nets had a game that night, against the Chicago Bulls, on national television. Durant was, as ever, sublime: swishing turnaround jumpers, his long legs gliding across the floor. Sometimes even now, knowing all he has done and can do, seeing his gravitational control is startling. Late in the third quarter, all five Bulls converged upon him as he drove into the paint—only to swing the ball down low and hand it off to his teammate Edmond Sumner as his body flew past the basket. Sumner missed the layup, but Yuta Watanabe was there with the putback—a rare moment, this season, of the team working in concert. Durant scored thirty-two points in thirty-eight minutes, with nine rebounds and six assists. The Nets lost, but that wasn’t Durant’s fault. None of the team’s problems seem to be. And yet almost everything that the team has done lately, it has done for him, or with his apparent blessing.
“I ain’t here to judge nobody or talk down on nobody for how they feel, their view or anything,” Durant said, after a shootaround on Friday, following Irving’s suspension. “I just didn’t like anything that went on. I feel like it was all unnecessary. I felt like we could have just kept playing basketball and kept quiet as an organization. I just don’t like none of it.” Later, he took to Twitter to clarify that he did not condone hate speech or anti-Semitism.
This week, Irving met with Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, who put out a stronger statement criticizing Irving’s decision to tweet the film after an initial vague one from the N.B.A. condemning hate speech. Irving’s fellow-players have been even more circumspect. Jaylen Brown, a vice-president of the National Basketball Players’ Association, told the Boston Globe that the union is uncomfortable with the conditions the Nets have outlined for Irving’s reinstatement, given that the league and the players’ association have no agreement on how to handle social-media posts, particularly when a link to something is shared without commentary. “I don’t believe Kyrie Irving is anti-Semitic,” Brown said. “I don’t think people in our governing bodies think he’s anti-Semitic. He made a mistake.” None of Irving’s teammates have spoken out against Irving or the film. LeBron James was one of the few to say anything negative; a week after the initial tweet, he said that Irving had “caused some harm to a lot of people.” Then, on Thursday afternoon, he tweeted, “Kyrie apologized and he should be able to play.”
Perhaps the players felt that anti-Semitism was not their issue. (Only one current N.B.A. player, Deni Avdija, from Israel, is known to be Jewish. “Hopefully he’s sorry for what he said,” Avdija told reporters, of Irving.) Perhaps Irving, who is also a vice-president of the players’ association, is too well liked within the league. Perhaps the players, like many others, have become exhausted by the depressing drumbeat of scandal. During the off-season, the free-agent forward Miles Bridges was arrested on domestic-violence and child-abuse charges. (Last week, he pleaded no contest to the former, and the latter were dismissed.) Then a law firm that had investigated the toxic workplace culture of the Phoenix Suns under the ownership of Robert Sarver published a damning report. Ten days later, the Celtics handed Ime Udoka his season-long suspension. At the end of October, the San Antonio Spurs cut a recent top draft pick, Josh Primo, following allegations that he exposed himself on repeated occasions, including to a team employee who is now suing both Primo and the Spurs.
The mood in the N.B.A., and not only in the N.B.A., is grim. Many people seem to be looking for answers in dark places, and they don’t need to look far—they can find them on YouTube and on signs hung from Los Angeles freeways, in the campaign speeches of gubernatorial candidates, and with the guidance of Amazon’s recommendation algorithm. Irving shrugged off responsibility for the message of the documentary, saying that he didn’t make it; Jeff Bezos didn’t make it either, but Amazon took people’s money for it—$11.99 for rental, $49.99 for purchase. By Friday, it was the top-ranked documentary on Amazon, and the book on which it was based was the top seller in the Christian-education category.
When the Nets faced the Indiana Pacers on Halloween, prior to Irving’s suspension, a group of young people sat courtside wearing T-shirts bearing the words “FIGHT ANTISEMITISM.” The shirts harked back to those worn by N.B.A. players in 2014, after the police killing of Eric Garner, and to the jerseys they wore in 2020—during nationwide protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer—which bore slogans calling for justice and equality. Floyd’s murder galvanized a movement, one that the N.B.A. embraced. But solidarity has been hard to find during the past week, in the N.B.A. and beyond. ♦
