Kyrie Irving lit a flame. The NBA, top to bottom, watched the fire spread. [View all]

Source: Washington Post

Kyrie Irving lit a flame. The NBA, top to bottom, watched the fire spread.

Perspective by Candace Buckner
Columnist
November 6, 2022 at 5:20 a.m. EST

While the NBA was engulfed in an unquenchable controversy, set by the league’s favorite arsonist, who would prefer to watch it all go down in flames, the most empowered professional athletes in the world sat and watched.

In the days after Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to a propagandist film heavy with antisemitic themes, his outspoken peers said nothing. While players could have stepped up and shown how to be allies, the very kind they expected from their White coaches and peers in 2020, they did nothing.

Their collective silence, coupled with their union’s statement (52 toothless words from the National Basketball Players Association), revealed the worst about empowerment and exclusivity run amok. And we have seen this problem through all walks of life. The thin blue line that will protect even a thug simply because he wears a badge. The politicians who would stick with their party’s talking points rather than show basic human sympathy for violence enacted on an elderly victim. And now, of course, the band of brothers who will fight together against racial injustice and hate speech as long as the perpetrator isn’t one of their own.

Irving is his own molotov cocktail, infused with unmerited hubris and crippling ignorance. And he hurled himself directly at the league. He created the worst kind of PR that allowed years of goodwill to be scorched by hypocrisy.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/11/06/kyrie-irving-nba-kevin-durant/

Non-paywalled link: https://wapo.st/3E9w8vA