The Brooklyn Nets are trying to find the guy who did this

Brooklyn cannot simply move on from the Kyrie Irving antisemitism scandal

NEW YORK -- On Monday, just before Steve Nash coached his final game for the Brooklyn Nets, a reporter asked him if he thought the Kyrie Irving situation had been resolved. Nash did not directly answer that question. He said: "I just hope that we all grow through this together."

One could compile a lengthy list of situations that Nash said he hoped the team would grow through during his almost-26-month tenure in Brooklyn. This, however, is the first antisemitism scandal. Irving shared a film full of antisemitic tropes on Twitter and Instagram last Thursday, and two days later doubled down in a post-game press conference, incredulously accusing a reporter of dehumanizing him by asking about it. 

Nash continued: "It's always an opportunity for us to grow and understand new perspectives. I think the organization is trying to take that stance where they're going to communicate through this and try to all come out in a better position and with more understanding and more empathy for every side of this debate and situation."

In a way, Nash was just doing his job: Trying to hold the team together through the latest firestorm in a long line of them. It is customary in the NBA to frame any kind of obstacle in the way of harmony and championships as opportunities to learn and grow. It is customary to offer virtually unconditional support to players when they're having a hard time, be it an injury, a shooting slump or an off-court issue. But trying to plug antisemitism into the usual overcoming-adversity model is like trying to plug your phone into your toaster.

The Nets organization has done a delicate dance, publicly condemning hate speech and antisemitism without directly confronting the reality that Irving has promoted it. "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America," a film that features Holocaust denial -- a fake quote discredited by the Anti-Defamation League misinforms viewers that "The Jews have established five major falsehoods which work to conceal their nature and protect their status and power," including "That 6 million people were killed in a holocaust during WWII." 

While he said that he "wasn't looking for any antisemitic stuff," he certainly found it. And when asked about sharing a 20-year-old clip of Alex Jones peddling nonsense about the "New World Order," a conspiracy theory itself rooted in antisemitism, Irving said, "It's true."  

No one associated with the franchise, aside from team owner Joe Tsai and YES Network analyst Richard Jefferson, has publicly criticized Irving. This is not, however, a matter of "every side" understanding each other, nor is it, as Marks put it on Tuesday, a matter of "getting the sides together so they can understand where people are coming from." Not when one side has been resentful that he has been asked to answer for sharing antisemitic filth.

Irving has sent his father and his stepmother/agent to meet with Anti-Defamation League leadership, according to the New York Daily News' Stefan Bondy, but Marks said that Irving has not spoken to the media since Saturday's catastrophic presser because "we don't want to cause more fuss right now, more interactions with people." This would surely not be the approach if Irving had indicated that he would handle the questions better next time.

Marks said that he understands that some fans will not want to cheer for Brooklyn right now. "I'm completely empathetic to what's going on here," he said. "I'm certainly not proud of the situation we find ourselves in." Then he lamented the fact that, when he turns on ESPN, he sees people talking about the team's various off-court issues: "I'd like to get back to basketball. I think that's what our players would like to get back to. They'd like to focus on the things that are important here. And that's competing at the highest level and playing basketball games."

It would be convenient for Brooklyn, for the NBA and for the National Basketball Players Association, on which Irving serves as a vice president, if everybody would accept their bland statements that don't give any hint as to why they were issued, move on and focus on basketball. If Irving so much as gestures toward contrition, these entities -- who are apparently all trying to find the guy who did this -- will be incentivized to accept it. Marks could not have chosen his words more poorly, though, when he said that the Nets want to "focus on the things that are important here." If they care about equality and inclusion and combating antisemitism, then they need to stop talking about this scandal as if it's another unfortunate thing that has happened to them, rather than an embarrassing crisis created by one person. 

And they need to stop framing it as if it's some kind of distraction from basketball. It's not a distraction. Basketball is.