Kyrie Irving says he was just trolling everyone with his flat Earth theory

The Celtics point guard wanted to clarify his stance on whether the Earth is flat

Kyrie Irving raised a bunch of eyebrows and caused a few headaches earlier this year when he proclaimed (multiple times) that he believes the Earth is flat. But was he serious or was he just trolling the masses?

Now in Boston, Irving appeared on The Sports Hub's morning show "Toucher & Rich" Tuesday, a CBS Sports Radio affiliate, and was asked about being a flat-Earther, and it appears he felt the need to clarify where he was coming from when he made those proclamations. Here's what the Celtics guard told Rich Shertenlieb:

"Look, look. Here it is. All I want to do is be able to have that open conversation," Irving said. "It was all an exploitation tactic. It literally spun the world — your guy's world — it spun it into a frenzy and proved exactly what I thought it would do in terms of how all this works. It created a division, or, literally stand up there and let all these people threw tomatoes at me, or have somebody think I'm somehow a different intellectual person because I believe that the Earth is flat and you think the world is round. It created exactly that.

"It became like, because I think different, does that knock my intellectual capacity or the fact that I can think different things than you?" he asked. "That was the intent behind it. Do your own research, don't come to me and ask me. At the end of the day, you're going to feel and believe the way you want to feel. But don't knock my life over that.

"When I do something, I know my intent. And it proved what I thought it would," said Irving.

That might just be a longwinded way of saying "it was just a prank, bro!" but, also, Irving didn't explicitly say that he actually doesn't believe the Earth is flat. Rather, it seems he used the ideology to conduct a social experiment to see how others painted him for questioning something that is generally believed to be a universal truth. 

While it may not be totally clear whether Irving thinks the world is flat, what is clear is that he's not a dumb person and his social experiment received the results that he expected it would.