Don't Even Think About Dragging Kobe Bryant Into the Kyrie Irving Trade Discussion

Kobe Bryant tweeted out that he's not influencing Kyrie Irving's trade request.

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kobe bryant kyrie irving

On Friday, Kyrie Irving became the top trending person/place/thing on Twitter after a report dropped stating the four-time Cleveland Cavaliers All-Star wanted to take his point guard duties to another team via a trade. It didn't take long for fans (and media) to speculate Irving's closed-door request was influenced by Kobe Bryant, a mentor of Irving's who quite infamously made his own trade request back in 2007 (that went unanswered by Lakers' management).

Irving, who has a close relationship with Kobe, spoke to ESPN last month about not making the same mistakes with LeBron James, as Kobe did with Shaq:

"It's a tough balance. Because everyone knows, Shaq was really dominant and [had] a lot of the individual accolades... unbelievable. And that's who he was. And Kobe was just consistently working on his game and consistently trying to prove everyone all the time. And you got to commend somebody for that. That just shows the true testament of their will and what they're willing to do and what they're willing to sacrifice, but I know I don't want to look back and say that I let my selfishness get in the way of us winning championships, because we have unbelievable talent on this team and unbelievable players, and so I don't want to ever take that for granted.
Whenever that time comes and it's my time to be the leader of the franchise, then I'll be well-prepared. But for now, I'm cool with just being—I'm very, very cool with being—a great guy on a great team."

Anyways, Kobe shat on the belief that he had anything to do with Kyrie's request by tweeting that he was too busy with his business endeavors to be involved:

That should put the issue to rest—right?

 

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