It sounds like you can add Kyrie Irving to the tiny, but still far too large, club of people who think that the earth is flat.
Irving made his comments known on a recent podcast that included a confused Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye. The revelation began, innocently enough, when Frye wondered aloud if aliens exist. Naturally the conversation segued from a relatively tame conspiracy theory (hey man, the universe is huge) to one that makes you wonder if Irving was zoning out back in kindergarten.
You can listen to the extremely suspect comments here. They begin around the 15:20 mark.
"This is not even a conspiracy theory," Irving stated. "The earth is flat." Asked what the f he was talking about, Irving went on a tangent that would be right at home in a Reddit thread or an Alex Jones broadcast. As Sports Illustrated pointed out, Irving stated that "particular groups," as well as an undefined "they," are responsible for this inaccuracy. What these "particular groups" and "they" would have to gain by peddling this theory is anyone's guess.
"It’s right in front of our faces," Kyrie added. "I’m telling you, it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us." Irving then attempted to use the team's plane travel to back up his viewpoint. "What I’ve been taught is that the earth is round. But if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that, can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets."
At that point Jefferson questioned why Irving would put "planets" in quotes, like they're also bogus. Irving had an answer for that.
"Because, everything that they send—or that they want to say they’re sending—doesn’t come back," he explained, confusingly. "There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it."
While it's always possible this is some elaborate joke, they spent way too much time on this subject with a discussion that was far too in-depth. If it was satire, it was too subtle to even pick up on. Still, if we were his PR guy, we'd just tell him to say "I was kidding," if anyone asks.
While this would seem to be similar to having a comprehensive debate on whether two plus two is indeed four, at least one NBAer backed Irving up:
The rest of Twitter was full of sheeple with the wool over their eyes:
Somewhere, B.O.B. and Tila Tequila are nodding.
