Around this time last year, Kyrie Irving stunned the NBA world when he publicly asked for a trade out of the Cleveland Cavaliers organization, revealing a shockingly fractured relationship between him and then-teammate LeBron James.
As it turns out, what we all saw back then was merely the last straw of a professional partnership between Irving and James that looked to never even reach the fractured stage. It was just straight-up broken, reportedly, from Day 1 while patched together enough for the two to miraculously win a championship in 2016.
Speaking in a roundtable discussion on local sports radio station 92.3 The Fan Cleveland, Cavaliers beat writers Dave McMenamin of ESPN, The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd and Joe Vardon of Cleveland.com detailed just how bad it was between the two superstar players.
Here are some of the highlights from the discussion, in no particular order.
[blockquote]McMenamin: I will freely admit it was worse than I thought. The LeBron-Kyrie relationship was worse than I thought and I told LeBron that on opening night. I said, ‘you guys did a great job fooling me, I had no idea.’ And I won’t tell you exactly what he said in response but he more or less told me it wasn’t a good relationship.[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Vardon: Kyrie resented how much attention, how much power and how much sway LeBron had within the organization on a number of levels. We’ve kind of allowed LeBron to say, ‘we shouldn’t have traded Kyrie,’ but he did absolutely nothing to keep him here until it was too late.
When it came out there was a month, a whole month before anybody had any idea the trade was gonna be to Boston. ‘Bron didn’t do anything. There was no love lost between them.[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Lloyd: It has been made clear to me by multiple people, Kyrie never really wanted LeBron to come back in the first place. That he didn’t think it was necessary.
Like, LeBron said something to Kyrie on the court following a game when he was with Miami something to the effect of, ‘keep going, keep doing what you’re doing, you never know, I could be back here one day,’ and Kyrie went to the locker room and basically said, ‘we don’t need him. What’s he talking about? We don’t need him.’[/blockquote]
[blockquote]Vardon: Even in the 2015 playoffs that year, if you remember, everybody was hurt and this was before Kyrie blew out his knee, was having leg problems and was limping through series and was taking games off, and this annoyed LeBron and LeBron’s people to no end. They were calling him soft and questioning his toughness, and LeBron was doing it in comments in the media. So it took a while for there to be respect between those two guys at all.[/blockquote]
Seeing these revelations and knowing the Cavaliers won a championship with all this going on makes that title run all the more amazing.
It also explains a lot of why Irving’s trade request seemed to be so full of poison.
With James officially signing with the Los Angeles Lakers, we won’t get to see these two bitter enemies go at it as much anymore. But given the fact Irving plays for the Boston Celtics and all the history and rivalry involved between those two storied franchises, the next round of Irving vs. James should be that much more intense.
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