Kyrie admits to 'exploitation tactic' with flat-Earth comments

Kyrie Irving isn't a flat-Earth truther after all.

In an interview with 98.5 The Sports Hub's "Toucher & Rich" show Monday at the Boston Celtics' media day, Irving finally admitted he was just trolling when he declared in February that he believed the Earth is flat.

"All I want to do is be able to have that open conversation," Irving explained. "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 throw 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."

Related: Kyrie convinced some middle schoolers Earth is flat

New teammate Jaylen Brown recently expressed interest in picking Irving's brain about the flat-Earth theory. It looks like they won't be having that conversation after all.