This was the only decision the Nets could make.
You can’t have a $30+ million part-time player. It just makes things too hard on the team, and it isn’t fair to his teammates.
Kyrie Irving will have to decide if he genuinely wants to be in the NBA or not.
Details had come out recently that the Nets would have to get the ok from Kevin Durant to make this move. Kyrie Irving is the only player on the Nets, Knicks, and Warriors (cities that have strict COVID protocol) that isn’t vaccinated and wouldn’t be allowed to play in any of his team’s home games.
Woj says that Kevin Durant, James Harden, Joe Tsai and Sean Marks will all be involved in deciding whether or not Kyrie Irving can be a part-time player this season.
Reports are the Nets are truly fed up with Kyrie. The only reason they signed him in the first place was that it was necessary to get Kevin Durant to commit to the team, but now that they have James Harden and a slew of solid veterans players on the team, they don’t feel like they need Kyrie to win a championship.
Kyrie will still get paid for road games even if he isn’t playing, so out of his $33 million salary, he would lose $16.5 million. That is a lot of money to miss out on because you don’t want to take a shot which is frankly 99% effective, but Kyrie has gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. While the government has done their fair share of illegal experimentation on black people, in this case, it wouldn’t make much sense considering the majority of people who are getting the vaccine are white.
The best thing for all parties would be a trade, but would any team want to risk trading for Kyrie, who has threatened retirement if he is traded.
Flip the page for the full statement from Nets and some of the Twitter reactions.