BOSTON — After Kyrie Irving responded to hours of profane chants from Celtics fans by giving them the finger several times in Sunday’s Game 1, he called it embracing the Dark Side.
It remains to be seen if the NBA fines Darth Kyrie.
The league didn’t announce any fines for Irving on Monday. But after the Nets guard gave a group of fans the finger, followed with a subtle double-finger salute behind his head, and shot a profane response back at another headed into halftime, there is a chance he hears from the league office either for those interactions or cursing in his postgame press conference.
“It is what it is. I’m not really focused on it. It’s fun. But where I’m from, I’ve dealt with so much, coming in here, you relish it as a competitor,” Irving said.
“This isn’t my first time in TD Garden so what you guys saw and what you guys think is entertainment, or the fans think is entertainment, all is fair in competition. So if somebody’s going to call me out by my name, I’m going to look them straight in the eye and see if they’re really about it. Most of the time they’re not.”
Irving’s contentious relationship with the Boston fans is well-documented, even though he refused to let it be defined as “hostile” after the game.
“We know they’re going to show out and support their team. But we know they’re going to let Kyrie hear it as much as possible,” Kevin Durant said. “So it is what it is; that’s a part of sport.”
With the Nets up by one with 15 seconds left, Durant missed a potential dagger 3-pointer. And while the miss goes in Durant’s stat line, the Celtics know that Irving was partly culpable on the play. He’d been white-hot but didn’t give up the ball and got trapped in a double team by Marcus Smart and Al Horford.
Irving finally passed to Durant with the shot clock winding down.
“To me, he didn’t want to get off the ball. He kept trying to exhaust all his opportunities and got stuck and pump-faked,” Ime Udoka said. “On that Durant play, the others are the ones who we want to make beat us, not Durant obviously; and [Jayson Tatum] was there and contested it great. So, it wasn’t like it was swing-swing to Durant and wide open. Like I said, he didn’t really want to get off the ball. So, fortunately, JT was on Durant and contested it well.”
Durant’s 23 points gave him 4,477 all-time in the playoffs, moving him past Jerry West (4,457 points) into eighth place on the NBA’s all-time list. Next up is Karl Malone at 4,761.
Irving’s 39 points were the second most scored in Game 1 of a first-round series in Nets playoff history. The record is 40 by the late Drazen Petrovic on April 23, 1992 at Cleveland.
Game 2 is Wednesday at 7 p.m. on TNT. Game 3 is Saturday at 7:30pm on ESPN.
Celtics guard Marcus Smart won the 2021-22 NBA Defensive Player of the Year award.
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