Jayesh Pagar
The Chicago Bulls have seen plenty of drama this season, but nothing quite like the Jaden Ivey situation. What started as locker room whispers has now exploded into one of the wildest stories in the NBA this year.
Reporters, social media, and a mid-flight Instagram Live have all played a role in exposing a side of Ivey that nobody expected to see.
According to Bulls insider Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jaden Ivey’s postgame interviews were anything but normal. Instead of the usual basketball talk, Ivey used to turn press sessions into full-on sermons.
He would ask reporters personal questions about their faith, including whether they had been “saved” and whether they had “fornicated before marriage.”
Sources close to the situation noted that before Ivey arrived in Chicago, people around the Detroit Pistons had already been calling him a “preacher,” but even that label didn’t fully capture what was happening.
What Is Really Going On Around Jaden Ivey
The situation escalated fast once Ivey turned to social media. After the Bulls held a Pride Night event, Ivey went on Instagram Live and openly challenged the NBA’s LGBTQ advocacy. Per The Athletic, Ivey said on the livestream:
“The world can proclaim LGBTQ, right? They proclaim Pride Month. And the NBA, they proclaim it. They show it to the world. They say, ‘Come join us for Pride Month, to celebrate unrighteousness.’ They proclaim it on the billboards. They proclaim it in the streets. Unrighteousness.”
The Bulls acted the same day, waiving Ivey on March 30 for “conduct detrimental to the team.”
The Live Stream That Said It All
Rather than going quiet, Ivey hopped on Instagram Live and kept going until a flight attendant stepped in and shut it down. On the stream, Ivey pushed back hard on the Bulls’ decision, saying:
“[The Bulls] said my conduct is detrimental to the team. Why didn’t they just say, ‘We don’t agree with his stance on LGBTQ’? Why didn’t they say that? How is it conduct detrimental to the team? What did I do to the team? What did I do to the players?”
He also opened up about his personal past, sharing on Instagram:
“The NBA was everything to me. I didn’t know God. When I came to the NBA I was a fornicator, I was a p*rn addict and I used to get drunk. That’s all I knew. After all those points I felt good… I felt like everything was set out for me.”
The mid-flight live stream ended abruptly when a flight attendant interrupted him mid-sentence, catching him saying:
“All I’m preaching is about Jesus Christ… They gonna cancel me I’m telling you… He sees the things you’re doing at night… the pornography… the fornication… the lying…” — at which point the flight attendant stepped in: “I’m sorry to bother you… are you on your mobile?”
