Kyrie Irving recently live-streamed himself watching and reacting to Kevin Durant's appearance on the Mind the Game podcast, and it went about as Kyrie as anything like that sort of thing can go. According to Sports Casting's Gia Nguyen, Kyrie went hard enough that his agent essentially had to step in at one point before he went too too far. These are the three most wild things we learned from Kyrie's crashout.
The Scary Hours Nets were a tire fire from the start
Let's get the elephant out of the room now, because anyone with eyes could have guessed that the KD/Kyrie/Harden Nets had one ring, tops, in them before everything went south.
But there was definitely something to seeing Kyrie call out KD and the team, Kenny Atkinson in particular. You'll remember Atkinson as the coach fired in favor of Steve Nash, who then went on to coach the Cavs to the top of the Eastern Conference.
"Brooklyn, I wish that we got a chance to get to know them beforehand, because they wasn’t f–king with me like that...did they want me on the team? Sure, you could say that. But Kenny Atkinson wasn’t f–king with me like that, bro. They didn’t want me like that. They wanted K.”
Even if Kyrie tried to temper his words a little, that's a big look into how the Nets viewed him, especially considering that KD is popularly viewed as the architect that brought him and Kyrie to Brooklyn in the first place.
Kyrie was willing to get released over the vaccine
Not to get political, but it's not a hot take that COVID Kyrie and the Nets were a circus. Without too much of a recap, Kyrie's refusal to get the COVID vaccine essentially took him out of half the Nets' season, much to his chagrin.
However, the mayor of your home city gets involved to the point of you having beef with him, it's going to be a bad look on all sides. And the solution of Kyrie playing only on the road was the most inane compromise in the world. Kyrie certainly agreed, to the point where he essentially let his stream know that he was willing to get released in the middle of the season over the mandate (you can view the clip here).
Ime Udoka was the Nets' actual snake
The most interesting tidbit Kyrie shared about the Nets' Scary Hours Era that we didn't already know about was probably Ime Udoka's poaching at the hands of the Boston Celtics.
You'll remember that Udoka led the Celtics to their first Finals appearance since the Garnett Era in 2022. If you're a diehard Celtics fan, you'll also likely remember that the 2022 Celtics started that playoff run by sweeping the Nets. What no one likely remembers is that just a year prior, Udoka was a top assistant for Brooklyn, one of Nash's lieutenants. And despite being completely blindsided by Harden's trade request that ended with him in Philadelphia, it was this betrayal that shocked and destabilized Kyrie and the Nets the most during that era. You can view the clip here.
Obviously there was more to the stream. After getting the call from his agent to cool down a little on his time with Brooklyn, Kyrie moved onto a lengthy diatribe on the GOAT debate, Kobe's legacy, his maturity in earlier years -- genuinely documentary-worthy footage. If nothing else, we learned that the man might have an incredible career in TV after he retires.