Kyrie Irving broke his silence Wednesday night as he continues to make headlines for his decision to not get vaccinated.
Kyrie is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per game and to fill you in on what’s stopping the bag, while the NBA doesn’t have a policy mandating players to get the vaccine, teams in cities including New York City and San Francisco are subject to mandates enforced by municipal law.
In other words, anyone playing for a team in those cities has to be vaccinated or they can’t play home games at their arenas.
Kyrie Irving’s choice to not get vaccinated prevents him from practicing or playing with his team. He’s reportedly losing an estimated $381,000 for every game he doesn’t play with the Nets.
Many people have debated Kyrie’s position, including sports analysts and TV hosts such as Stephen A. Smith, but Kyrie had yet to publicly address his stance.
Then on Wednesday night, Kyrie seemed to have had enough of the backlash. He unloaded for nearly 30 minutes on Instagram Live, explaining his decision to remain unvaccinated and questioning the need for all the criticism when it’s his choice and his body.
“I chose to be unvaccinated, and that was my choice. And I would ask y’all just to respect that choice, and I am gonna just continue to stay in shape, be ready to play, be ready to rock out with my teammates, and just be part of this whole thing,” Kyrie said, adding that he has no plans to retire despite some rumors that were brewing Wednesday.
Then Kyrie seemingly took a shot at Stephen A. Smith, who said that Kyrie was acting “flat-out stupid.”
“To continue to play with my name, you know to continue to play with my image, to continue to paint me in a certain type of way without me speaking, these dudes are puppets!” Kyrie exclaimed. “…They calling me unintelligent, calling me all these different types of names and they will never say it to my face.”
You can watch a portion of Kyrie’s live below:
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