Why Kyrie Irving subjected himself to ESPN’s “First Take” is beyond me, but the All-Star point guard spent 90 minutes on Monday morning cryptically answering questions from Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman about his reasons for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and his relationship with LeBron James.

Inquiries about Irving’s trade request, reports he wanted out from LeBron’s shadow and the league-wide drama that ensued were met with responses along these lines from the newest member of the Boston Celtics: “I don’t really have an ego. I have a presence and aura about me that’s very reality-based,” and, “Oh, if you’re very much woke, there’s no such thing as distractions, especially all this.”

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Except, Irving answered one line of questioning with the very clarity we’ve sought since the trade:

Irving then elaborated:

I can see this from both sides of the aisle. From Irving’s perspective, he no longer wanted to play for the Cavaliers. That was a personal decision, and management could make it happen. LeBron was not part of either equation, so why include him in the conversation? Irving does not answer to LeBron.

On the other hand, when two partners hold the fate of a billion-dollar operation in their hands like LeBron and Kyrie did, it seems like common courtesy to inform the other about a potential disruption.

You would certainly tell coworkers you considered friends about something so earth-shattering, but maybe Irving didn’t consider James a friend. Maybe he didn’t trust James to keep quiet about it. Maybe he thought James was pushing for the reported trade that would have sent him to the Phoenix Suns in a three-team deal that would have brought Paul George and Eric Bledsoe to Cleveland.

Or maybe he just felt like James wouldn’t have extended the same courtesy with respect to his potential decision to leave for Los Angeles next summer. These are the questions that were left unanswered.

In the end, Irving wasn’t happy in Cleveland, and he’s now “ecstatic” in Boston. It would be easier for us if there was one reason he could cite for why that’s the case, because it would help us make more sense of a player consciously leaving LeBron’s side on a championship-caliber team. We also know Kellerman believes that reason must be something personal between the two ex-teammates, since the ESPN host interrogated the heck out of Irving about it, but maybe it’s less dramatic than that.

Reading between the tea leaves, it seems Irving’s primary reason for wanting out was to realize his full potential as a player, something he can’t do on a LeBron-led roster. Twice Irving expressed enthusiasm for being more of the complete pick-and-roll playmaker that Boston is asking him to be instead of the isolation-heavy scoring option that Cleveland wanted him to be. Asked flat-out what he was most excited about in transitioning from the Cavaliers to the Celtics, he said, “Actually playing point guard.”

Kellerman was eager to frame Irving’s “perfecting my craft” remarks as an individualistic attitude unbecoming of any true sportsman’s quest for a championship, but Irving wasn’t having that, either:

If we’re looking for a rift between Irving and James to spice up the Cleveland-Boston rivalry, Kyrie might have offered us one with his thoughts on how the trade request became public. To his credit, Smith asked Irving about a wild accusation he reported back in July — that, “if Kyrie Irving was in front of LeBron James right now, LeBron James would be tempted, quote, to beat his a**, end quote.”

To which Irving responded on Monday morning: “I felt like the timing was impeccable, if you ask me. I think about how ironic it was that I was on my China trip and how my trade request all of a sudden just came out publicly. It was hurtful, because I knew how professional I had kept it throughout the whole entire process and how strategic it was, because I knew that it was going to be madness. And it turned out to be like that. When you’re living in a reality-based world — and I’m a very awake individual — and you have all these exterior forces trying to change or skew everyone else’s opinion, and I’m not able to say anything and I’m sitting back and being very, very patient, it became something I didn’t understand, because of the amount of moments that we had together as a team.”

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This is the sort of cryptic response that dominated the interview, but it sure sounded as if he was addressing another Smith report from late July — that Irving’s camp “believes LeBron James had everything to do with the news getting out that Kyrie Irving wants to be traded, because Kyrie Irving and his representation and others met with the Cavaliers a couple weeks ago, and not a word got out until recently. They believe that LeBron James got word of it and was put off by it and leaked it.”

Now, there’s your drama. So, really, Irving’s 90 minutes on “First Take” did little to limit speculation about his relationship with LeBron and may have even inflamed it, because we now know just how unhappy he was in Cleveland, he didn’t feel LeBron deserved to know about his desire to play elsewhere, and LeBron may have been the one that made this story as public as it was for a month.

Plus, we got some pretty fantastic flat-Earthian answers out of Irving, like this one:

And this one:

Meanwhile, as Irving was delivering these cryptic answers, LeBron was doing this on Instagram:

That we are being treated to stories like this about Irving and LeBron on the same day Kevin Durant may or may not have revealed that he uses alternate accounts to defend himself from Twitter trolls is just one more reason that the NBA offseason is the best soap opera going. God bless Woke Kyrie.

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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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