Kyrie Irving went live on his Twitch channel last night and took on some factions of NBA fans for taunting players on their DMs following losses.
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Irving has been in the NBA news cycle almost continuously for nearly 18 months now. And practically none of those headlines have anything remotely to do with basketball.
He first made waves with his steadfast stance to get a Covid-19 vaccine administered on himself. He then had disparaging comments to make about James Harden following the latter’s trade request.
Over the offseason, he had Nets fans on suicide watch while pondering whether to accept his player option. At the start of this season, he got himself suspended with a tweet promoting an anti-Semitic movie.
Finally, he put in a trade request and was sent to the Dallas Mavericks. It hasn’t taken him long to make waves off the court on his newest team either.
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Kyrie Irving blames sports betting for toxic fan culture among NBA diehards
Kyrie was in his element, so to speak, following a deplorable loss to the New Orleans Pelicans last night. The 8-time All-Star poured his heart out in a Twitch live session, during which he also spoke about some other issues close to his heart.
In one particular segment, he blamed sports betting and the public’s craze about it for making NBA fandom more toxic over the years. You may recall that Adam Silver paved the way for this starting in the 2018-19 season. Kyrie’s rant goes thus:
“Gambling and sports betting has completely taken the purity and the fun away from the game at times…There’s a difference between being a diehard fan and supporting your team and loving your team vs somebody that’s betting on a parlay or somebody that wants to hit.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want people wasting their money on me. But god damn! This whole community of gamblers has come into the game of basketball.”
“If you wanna gamble, why don’t you gamble on something that makes sense to you. If you gamble on me, I’m not gonna tell you if this is a good game or a bad game.”
“You’re gonna win or lose, but that doesn’t mean sliding into people’s DMs or wishing bad on them or doing the extra s**t that goes on (is good). It blows my mind!”
The NBA definitely has a gambling problem
Irrespective of what he’s said in the past, Irving is on the money with his take here. The league has been shamelessly promoting sports betting even for casual fans over the past 5 seasons.
Although every sportsbook warns consumers of the ills of betting huge amounts of money, a lot of fans hardly pay heed to these warnings and put themselves in financial jeopardy with some foolhardy bets.
When they can’t get the wins they want, they often turn their ire onto players. It has come to a boiling point in the past few days, and not in a good way.
