Kyrie Irving was interviewed postgame after the Nets’ 141-126 win in Game 4 of their first-round series vs the Boston Celtics. Irving had a water bottle thrown at him after the game, and most of his comments were surrounding the incident.
Irving was first asked about the indecent as a whole, giving this response: “It’s unfortunate that sports has come to a lot of this kind of crossroads where you’re seeing a lot of old ways come up… underlying racism and just treating people like they’re in a human zoo… there’s just a certain point where it just gets too much… people just feel very entitled out here… it’s too much and it’s a reflection on us as a whole when you have fans acting like that.”
Next, he was asked about it on a deeper level, and what is going wrong: “Well we keep saying like we’re human, we’re human… but we don’t get treated like we have rights when we’re out there at times… we just call things out before they happen like I did the other day… then you have things at happened at the Garden, things that happen in Utah… there’s a lot of history there of things happening.”
Lastly, he spoke about the idea that banning fans is not enough: “As a black man playing in the NBA, dealing with this stuff is fairly difficult… banning fans, I get the objective, but at the same time it doesn’t stop people from running on the court… I’ve had situations so often… we don’t talk about it because we want to be mentally tough… it’s just when they start doing things that are out of character… I just want to move on.”
