When Kyrie Irving requested a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers after the 2016-17 NBA season, it was quickly blamed on the point guard no longer wanting to play with LeBron James. According to Irving, that was a false media narrative.

Irving and James won one NBA Championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but there’s certainly a “what if” factor regarding their brief tenure together. What if Irving never requested a trade following the 2016-17 NBA season? Would they have won more titles in Cleveland? Would James have left the Cavaliers in free agency a second time?

Irving joined the I Am Athlete podcast and discussed his departure from Cleveland, blaming the media for creating drama to make his departure from James and the Cavaliers out to be more than it was.

“I’m continuously reminded over and over again, ‘Yo, you left ‘Bron. How could you do that?’” Irving said. “You got his fanbase, you got my fanbase, and you got team fanbases going at it, ‘Yo, why couldn’t this work?’ And I say this; I asked for a trade because I was looking for something different. I was a man of my word when I went to the organization, I sat the higher ups down and said, ‘Look, I know y’all have future plans, tell me right now.’ They told me their future plans, I said, ‘Look, this isn’t for me.’”

Irving was requesting to leave a perennial championship contender, a franchise that went to three straight NBA Finals and was one season removed from giving the city of Cleveland its first major sports title since 1964. And he made the request without talking to James first, so naturally, the media ran with the narrative that Irving no longer wanted to play sidekick to the league’s best player.

“Didn’t get a chance to talk to Bron before the media ended up coming out and saying that I asked for a trade,” Irving explained. “So I go over to China and I’m on my Nike tour – somehow the news gets leaked while I’m in China! I’m not even on American soil right now! So I can’t even get on, to defend myself!”

“So now I see all these reports, and you know, 12 hours ahead in China, so I’m staying up til like 4 a.m. like, ‘What’s being reported now?’ And I didn’t have a sense of how to manage that when all the media is coming after me.”

The headlines quickly put the two NBA superstars against each other, which Irving says isn’t the image he wanted to create. “Me and him never had beef like that,” Irving claimed.

Irving and James have since reconciled, with rumors even occasionally surfacing that they could look to team up again. Maybe Irving really never had any issue with James. But it was pretty naïve of him to request a trade from the Cavaliers without telling James and expect everyone to assume they were getting along. And it was even more naïve of him to request a trade from James’ team, fly to China and expect the news cycle to avoid talking about it until he returned.

[I Am Athlete]

About Brandon Contes

Brandon Contes is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He previously helped carve the sports vertical for Mediaite and spent more than three years with Barrett Sports Media. Send tips/comments/complaints to bcontes@thecomeback.com