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Toucher & Hardy

The Vertical's Chris Mannix Talks Kyrie Irving-Isaiah Thomas Trade

Toucher & Hardy

Beasley Media Group

Sports

4.3735 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Vertical's Chris Mannix joined Toucher & Rich to break down the stunning blockbuster trade between the Cavaliers and Celtics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

I've said it several times this morning.

0:03.1

Man, step back and look at what just happened over the last two months, and this is absolutely insane.

0:07.5

Kyrie Irving is a member of your boss in Celtics and Isaiah Thomas, Jay Crowder, Ante Zizich, and that Brooklyn pick are now with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

0:15.9

And the company that was on top of this before anyone else yesterday was Yahoo Sports and the vertical in particular. And from Yahoo Sports and the vertical, it's a good friend Chris Mannix. Hey, Chris, good morning, man. Good morning, guys. He's on the AT&T expert hotline. All right, so we've talked all about how the parts are going to fit and everything. First of all, tell me a little bit about how all this went down,

0:38.0

what you guys know about the behind the scenes on how Danny and made this all work out.

0:43.6

Well, I mean, look, if you know Boston and their brass,

0:48.3

there isn't a team in the league more proactive than Danny.

0:51.9

And to a greater degree, Mike Zarin, the assistant GEO does most of the legwork in deals

0:57.6

like this.

0:58.2

And, you know, the second that Kyrie Irving came available, they were in contact with

1:02.9

Cleveland and, you know, kicking the tires on it.

1:05.2

Cleveland, obviously, they were going through a whole bunch of different things over

1:08.9

the last couple of months.

1:09.9

And I can tell you that there were people in Cleveland as recently as a couple of days ago that we're still harboring some hope that this could kind of blow over, that they could bring Kyrie Irving to camp and that they could just figure it out on the fly. Obviously, you know, Dan Gilbert didn't feel that way and we have this deal. But, you know, Boston, whenever a star becomes available, Boston's the first team in line to express interest with their, you know, using their draft resources. And that's exactly what happened here. They had the perfect package to kind of put together for Cleveland, which gets a player that can help them compete for a championship now and a potential draft pick that will help them rebuild if LeBron

1:44.5

leaves in 2018.

1:45.5

How bad were things between LeBron and Kyrie? I mean, we've read a lot of bit. We've read a ton of stuff, but I don't know. I mean, now it seems that it was bad enough to where they had to get rid of them. If you're going to make a trade to the team that you play, the Eastern Conference files. It seemed like this is something

1:59.6

that the two of them definitely couldn't work together.

2:01.7

It was never bad

2:03.7

between LeBron and Kyrie. I mean, I would describe bad as being Shaq and Kobe. You know, what they went through was bad. There was, you know, palpable, visceral disdain for each other. Kyrie didn't have that. Kyrie just wanted an opportunity to step out of LeBron's

2:19.2

shadow. There was no issue with them personally. They didn't dislike each other. They were on a

2:23.7

podcast together a couple of months ago. I mean, they're there, and when I talk to players in Cleveland,

2:28.8

they just say that Kyrie is kind of a unique guy, and he just wanted the opportunity to go out

...

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