NEW ORLEANS — For the record, Fox Sports Ohio’s Allie Clifton sounded as incredulous as the rest of us when Kyrie Irving repeatedly insisted the Earth is flat.

That is the belief the 24-year-old Cavaliers guard stated during a Feb. 17 “Road Trippin’ with RJ and Channing” podcast posted on cavs.com that sent the Twitter world into a frenzy Friday.

When asked “who” has the answer, Irving said, “It’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”

Channing Frye tried to get Irving to recant by asking him again, “Do you belief the Earth is round or flat?”

Irving responded, “For what I’ve known for many years, what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round. If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned rotating and in specific dates being perpendicular …

“There’s no concrete information except for the information they’re giving us. They’re pointing you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you’ve just got to go searching for it. I’ve been searching for it for a while.”

Golden State’s Draymond Green did not disagree.

“I don’t know,” Green said. “I haven’t done enough research. But it may be flat.”

Forget all the scientific evidence or the images, from space, of a round Earth.

“Who’s to say that picture is telling the truth?” Green asked. “I can make a round picture with my iPhone today and make it look round. So I don’t know? I’m not saying I think it’s flat or round. I don’t know. But it could be.”

NBA commissioner Adam Silver said that he believes it is clear Irving was “trying to be provocative.”

“I think it was effective,” Silver said. “I think it was a larger comment on the so-called fake news debate that’s going in our society right now in terms of what’s reported, and it led to an interesting discussion.”

— From wire reports