Kyrie Irving has come under extensive fire for his controversial tweet last week, but one analyst who's followed the Brooklyn Nets now is speaking in his defense.
Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson, a lead NBA insider for Bally Sports, spoke out on Irving's situation while appearing on a New York television station Monday night. Robinson defended Irving, who sparked controversy for tweeting support for the film, "Hebrews To Negroes," which is based on a book that reportedly includes anti-Semitic tropes, while referring to what the Nets guard did as "kitchen-table talk."
"I think this backlash really is in poor taste because he is in a contract year, and I'll even take it a step further, when you look at this instance here, if the Nets were 5-0 we wouldn't be having this conversation," Robinson said, as shared on his Twitter. "I think when you look at a team that is 1-4, and we're focusing on the issue that is an Amazon Prime link that has, at that point, 1,200 reviews and 4 1/2 stars. We're getting away from the game.
"Kyrie, to me, as well as Kevin Durant, are the two leading scorers. When you go down the list, they're 30-plus scorers and then you look down the list and Nicolas Claxton is the third-leading scorer at 11 points per game," Robinson continued. "We should be talking about the Nets and their dynamic more than we should be talking about a movie. So I'm bipartisan on this, I'm very close, but I'm also just a realist. I don't think that this should be a conversation and there is such a thing as kitchen-table talk conversation, and I kind of file it under that."
As one might expect, the responses and quote-tweets to Robinson were more negative than positive, though some spoke in agreement.
Irving initially said he wouldn't back down from the tweet when pressed about the "promotion" of the movie during a heated exchange with an ESPN reporter. Irving has, however, since deleted the tweet. Perhaps Nets owner Joe Tsai, who already expressed his disapproval with Irving publicly on social media, was able to convince him to do so.
Things continue to go from bad to worse in Brooklyn, both with Irving's off-the-floor comments and the Nets' on-court struggles. A number of fans attended the Nets' game at Barclays Center on Monday night sporting "Fight Anti-Semitism" shirts in a statement targeted at Irving. It proved to be the final game Steve Nash would coach in Brooklyn as the organization parted ways with him Tuesday afternoon.
