Kyrie Irving has been suspended, but it took a while to get to this point.
That’s drawing the ire of people around the league.
The Brooklyn Nets on Thursday announced that they were suspending Irving for at least five games, and the Anti-Defamation League turned down the guard’s $500,000 donation. Irving since has released an apology that is not riddled with qualifiers, but that came after he repeatedly refused to give a straightforward answer to direct questions about if he has anti-Semitic beliefs.
From commissioner Adam Silver to the Nets themselves, the situation hasn’t been handled with much urgency. Irving posted about the documentary, which contains anti-Semitic propaganda, last Thursday, and it took a week for him to face any real punishment.
In the time between he had disastrous press conferences, at times sparring with reporters while not taking accountability for posting about the documentary. The Nets even chose not to make him available to the media earlier in the week so that he wouldn't inflame the situation, but his presser Thursday morning -- after that break from speaking to reporters -- was still a mess. That prompted the suspension.
Even as recently as this Thursday, Silver said he would meet with Irving “within the next week,” a perplexing decision considering the Nets were in the midst of a homestand over the last week and the NBA offices are in Manhattan.
On the “Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective” podcast released Friday, ESPN’s Tim Bontemps said the handling of the situation is not being received well.
“To me, this is a failure in leadership from the NBA, from the top down,” Bontemps said. “And I’m sure you guys have had the same thing, I've had so many people in the league reach out to me the past few days and are just outraged at how this has been handled and the way this has made the league look, and the way it’s made everybody in the league look. And it’s just, to me, it’s embarrassing that it took all the way to this point for anybody to say that what this guy did was wrong.”
It’s worth mentioning that few people around the NBA have expressed this outrage publicly. Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr addressed it Thursday, and former players like Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley have condemned Irving, but such reaction has been sparse among those currently in the league.
Perhaps that will change in the coming days. Regardless, this has been far from a masterclass from Adam Silver, the NBA and the Nets in how to handle these types of situations.
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