BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – DECEMBER 19: Kyrie Irving #11 of the Boston Celtics celebrates after Jayson Tatum scored against the Phoenix Suns at TD Garden on December 19, 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
By Ty Anderson, 985TheSportsHub.com
New England Living was not for Kyrie Irving.
That’s according to ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan, who detailed Irving’s issues with The Hub on a podcast released Friday.
“The part of the thing is Kyrie Irving didn’t like Boston,” MacMullan said on the latest episode of The Hoop Collective Podcast. “I’ve been told this by many people. He didn’t like living in Boston. He just didn’t.”
Now while we can debate the pros and cons of Boston forever — it’s tougher to find a city where fans care as much as they do in Boston, even if they have to sit in hours of traffic for even the most mundane of trips outside their home — didn’t stop Irving from telling a packed TD Garden that he planned on staying with the Celtics if they’d have him, or from filming a commercial where Irving talked about wanting to be the last Celtic to wear No. 11. If Jackie’s reporting is true, and we honestly have no reason to doubt her reporting given her track record, that’d make Irving’s aforementioned actions all the more bizarre.
But then again, we’ve come to pretty much know Irving for making little to no sense most of the time.
Irving’s problems weren’t just with living in Boston by the end of his second season with the C’s, though, as the hot-and-cold guard had issues with the team’s head coach and the man who assembled the squad everybody expected to contend for a title.
“By the end, he had issues with Brad [Stevens], by the end he had issues with Danny [Ainge],” MacMullan continued. “By the end, he had issues with pretty much all of us.”
Irving is set to become a truly unrestricted free agent on June 30.