Today’s Binary Response is to the situation involving Jaden Ivey who was released yesterday by the Chicago Bulls. The folks over at ClutchPoints did a good job of covering the story over the last few weeks leading up to the Bulls making the move yesterday. Please sign up to get our Binary Response articles directly in your inbox!
Jaden Ivey getting waived by the Bulls reads like the final chapter of a story that was never really about basketball in the first place. The front office took a low-risk swing at the deadline, but there’s been a pretty consistent drumbeat that Chicago never viewed Ivey — and several of the other deadline acquisitions — as long-term fixtures so much as short-term bets and cap tools.
When you combine that with everything that’s happened over the last two weeks, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bulls were already halfway out the door before his latest livestream ever hit the timeline.
Layer on the health piece. Ivey had already been shut down for the season with a lingering left knee issue, after playing just four games in a Bulls uniform. The team announced he’d miss the rest of the year to continue rehab, and multiple reports emphasized the long tail of his leg injuries going back to Detroit.
That’s why his own pushback on Instagram — I’ve just been rehabbing, I haven’t even been with the team, so how is my conduct detrimental? — stings the way it does; he’s right that it wasn’t about what he did in the locker room last week, but wrong if he thinks that means the Bulls had no basis to move on.
His comments did that all by themselves. Going live to rip the league and its teams for promoting Pride Month and supporting the LGBTQ community is already a self-inflicted wound, even if you strip all context away. You’re on a non-guaranteed path, injured, only months into a new situation, and you decide to publicly frame the NBA’s inclusion efforts as celebrating unrighteousness while casting yourself as the lone voice of righteousness under attack.
That’s not some nuanced theological disagreement; it’s a deliberate choice to turn your employer and a huge portion of the fan base into targets in the middle of your rehab.
And it wasn’t a one-off bad night on the phone. Before he ever really got settled in Chicago, Ivey was already in the news for social-media sermons about how the Pistons won’t matter on judgment day and for hour-long religious monologues where basketball felt like an afterthought. After the Bulls cut him, he doubled down again, saying every team would decide they don’t want him because he’s too religious, as if this is purely about persecution and not the natural consequence of mixing inflammatory culture-war rhetoric with an unstable on-court situation. That’s not just conviction; that’s bad decision making wrapped in a martyr complex.
Front offices live in a world of risk management and probability. You’re a rehabbing guard who’s already on your second team in a year with restricted free agency coming this summer and still trying to prove you can stay healthy enough to defend in the NBA. That’s already a fragile resume.
Add to it a public-relations firestorm and a reputation for disruptive social-media behavior is like stacking cinder blocks on a cracked shelf. Ivey talks like he’s above that calculus, as if preaching however he wants is a protected right that exists outside contract status, role, or availability. It isn’t. For superstars, it isn’t. For fringe rotation guys, it really isn’t.
The most important part of this whole thing is the mental-health layer. In one video, Ivey described feeling betrayed by his own family, saying they’re calling him crazy, losing [his] mind, and even psycho because of what he’s been saying.
A family member has also publicly acknowledged to a few news outlets that he’s dealt with mental-health disorders since childhood, including an ADHD diagnosis. When the people who raised you are both naming your struggles and sounding the alarm about your current state, that’s not just criticism; that’s a pleading red flag that you need professional help, not more followers.
None of that excuses the things he’s said, especially about LGBTQ people and other faith traditions, but it does complicate how fans and media should respond. There’s a difference between holding someone accountable for harmful speech and gleefully dunking on a guy whose own relatives are saying he’s not okay. The Bulls can be right about cutting bait for conduct detrimental to the team while we also acknowledge that a 24-year-old spiraling on Instagram Live is a human being who needs a doctor, not just a new agent and a PR team.
When multiple reporters can say this was the last straw and that the locker room won’t shed a tear, it tells you teammates were done long before this last video hit their phones. Combine that with a front office that never truly signaled long-term investment, and the message is loud: his words didn’t just cost him a roster spot, they burned whatever benefit of the doubt he had left in that building.
Here’s the thing, folks: What Ivey seems to be missing is that faith, by itself, is not the problem and never has been in this league. The problem is using your platform to punch down, lecturing fans, teammates, and entire communities from a place of self-righteousness, then acting stunned when the teams who pay you decide the headache isn’t worth it. Every player is allowed to believe what they believe.
With that… Professional athletes have an unwritten job of being role models. No professional athlete — especially not the twelfth man on a 29-win roster, a former lottery pick trying to salvage his career, or the greatest superstar who’s ever laced them up — has an automatic right to preach at the world the way Jaden Ivey has been doing since before he ever suited up in Chicago and expect immunity from the consequences.
If you cannot play with them, sometimes you should not root for them either!