It’s perhaps a sign of a placid NBA All-Star weekend when the biggest issue the commissioner Adam Silver had to address is whether Kyrie Irving actually believes the Earth is flat.

The Cleveland Cavaliers guard sparked debate on Friday when comments he made on a podcast started circulating. “If you really think about it from the landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that – can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets,” said Irving on the Road Trippin’ podcast.

However, Silver said that Irving was trying to make a point about how false information circulates in the media. “Kyrie and I went to the same college [Duke]. He may have taken some different courses,” Silver joked, before adding: “In all seriousness, he was trying to be provocative and I think it was effective. I think it was a larger comment on the sort of so-called fake news debate that’s going on in our society right now ... personally I believe the world is round.”

Silver may have been referring to Irving’s interview on Saturday with cleveland.com, in which the player was asked if his flat-Earth theory was a comment on fake news. “There’s just so many real things going on, things that are going on that’s changing the shape of our lives,” he said. “I think sometimes it gets skewed because of who we are in the basketball world: ‘Oh, man, what does he actually think? I don’t like Kyrie Irving because he thinks that the world is flat, or he thinks that the world can’t be wrong.’

Silver also addressed the threat of a travel ban under the Trump administration, which would have an impact on a league in which 25% of the players are foreign. “We do a tremendous amount of business on a global basis, and if you think about what the NBA stands for, it’s, in essence, the very best all coming together, the very best in the world all coming together to perform at the highest level,” he said. “So government restrictions on travel, I am concerned about. It goes against the fundamental values and the fundamental ingredients of what make for a great NBA.”