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‘Unacceptable’: Here’s what Brad Stevens said about fan who threw bottle at Kyrie Irving
"Regardless of the team you’re cheering for, they should be treated with dignity and respect."
Brad Stevens called the actions of the fan who threw a water bottle at Kyrie Irving “unacceptable” prior to the Celtics’s matchup with the Nets in Game 5 on Tuesday.
Following the Celtics’s 141-126 loss to the Nets in Game 4 on Sunday, a 21-year-old Celtics fan launched a water bottle at Irving as he left the floor. The bottle narrowly missed Irving, and the fan was promptly detained and cuffed by Boston police.
The fan will be charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
“The bottle throwing is just unacceptable,” Stevens told reporters via Zoom on Tuesday. “It’s not part of the game, it’s not the way anybody in the stadium — 99.9 percent of the people in the stadium — want to be represented. It’s just unacceptable, and I was glad it was handled accordingly.
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“A lot of these incidents that are happening across the league — [We] understand that fans can bring a lot of passion and rightfully so, but it has to be within the confines of being respectful, and understanding that these guys are giving their all for their team. Regardless of the team you’re cheering for, they should be treated with dignity and respect. Throwing something at somebody is not okay.”
Irving — who said he hoped fans wouldn’t show “subtle racism” before Game 3 — called for fans to be civilized after the incident.
“It’s been that way in history in terms of entertainers, performers and sports for a very long time, just underlying racism and treating people like they’re in a human zoo,” he said. “Throwing stuff at people, saying things. There’s a certain point where it gets to be too much.
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“So I called it out. I just wanted to keep it strictly basketball, and then you just see that people just feel very entitled out here. Pay for their tickets, great. I’m grateful that you’re coming in to watch a great performance, but we’re not at the theater. We’re not throwing tomatoes and other random stuff at the people that are performing. It’s too much, and it’s a reflection on us as a whole when you have fans acting like that. So hopefully people learn their lessons from being banned for however many years, from being arrested.”
The Celtics and Nets tip off at 7:30 p.m. on TNT.
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