Kyrie Irving Brings Out The Return Of Passive-Aggressive LeBron

This morning, Kyrie Irving went on First Take and was impressively evasive as Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman peppered him questions about his rift with LeBron James. A sampling:

Irving is, of course, now a member of the Boston Celtics because he didn’t want to play with LeBron James, but try as they might, Smith and Kellerman couldn’t get much out of Irving on that subject. That’s just sort of how Irving is. He’ll be coy about his relationships with his teammates and he’ll also drop nonsensical bits of word salad disguised as deep wisdom.

Meanwhile, LeBron James was hanging out at UCLA with Kevin Love and working out. Look at these two buddies! What great teammates.

James has a propensity for conspicuous tweets showing how much he doesn’t care and is doing other stuff, like when he posted a video of himself working out and enjoying some music shortly after a video emerged of Irving and Steph Curry mocking him. Brian Windhorst revealed this year that James would routinely go out of his way to tweet about other stuff when the Warriors were on national TV. There was also this unsubtle tweet that came right as Irving’s trade demand came to light:

The point is, nothing on LeBron’s feed is accidental. So in this case, it’s not difficult to read into James’s latest videos—he’s close with Kevin Love, with whom he’s famously had some issues before, and he’s not sweating whatever Irving has to say on TV—exactly what he wants you to read into it.