Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are very good friends off the court, the main reason why they teamed up in Brooklyn last year, and it’s been proven that they have each other’s backs. Something they have in common is that they receive a lot of bad comments from the public but they’ve managed to take all of that.
Durant has defended his teammate and friend against all the critics he’s received in recent days. KD said Irving is ‘misunderstood’ because he always keeps it real and says what he feels no matter what.
“What does, like, misunderstood mean?,” Durant said at the 18:20 mark. “The truth sometimes can hurt a lot of people. When you tell the raw truth, especially in this society, it’s frowned upon. Kyrie tells it how it is. There’s no sugarcoating.”
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The last controversy that involved Kyrie’s name was a group call with 90 players expressing their reservations about the NBA bubble that started exactly one week ago. KD also addressed this issue, explaining that Kyrie wasn’t trying to create a revolution or anything like that. In fact, plenty of players felt the same way as the 2016 NBA champion but he gets all the punches because he’s the biggest name.
“In this situation with the NBPA, he wasn’t the only one that had a problem with what was potentially going to happen in the bubble. Like, everybody had concerns,” Durant said. “But obviously, he’s Kyrie—the biggest one—and that’s going to sell papers. At this time, especially during the pandemic, nobody making money, so you get an opportunity to get some clicks, it’s easy to use Kyrie. But it’s 80, 90 players who had the same questions he had.”
“Kyrie wasn’t the one, like, ‘Yo, let’s get everybody together,'” he said. “Five or six people called one another, like, ‘Oh shit, I’m feeling that way too.’ Then, another 10 people called…But Kyrie the biggest voice out of ’em all, and because he relates to everyone in the league.”
Even though the bubble is happening and there aren’t new cases of COVID-19, the concerns that some players presented were reasonable. Kyrie has taken advantage of his time off and is trying to help black communities and even his colleagues in the WNBA, starting a $1.5 million fund for the WNBA players who chose to opt out of the 2020 season.
Irving is very active trying to make a difference and those things don’t get as much coverage as his controversies. Still, he’s confident in himself and all the good things he’s doing to help the less fortunate.
