Dwyane Wade on Kyrie Irving's Cleveland shade: "I never talk [expletive] about a place"

Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue played it with humor and new Clevelander Dwyane Wade played it down the middle — at first — when asked Friday about former Cav Kyrie Irving's perceived slight of the 216.

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“Oh, I thought he was talking about Cleveland,” Lue deadpanned at the Cavs' shootaround Friday morning (via ESPN.com ), referring to Irving's "It's really a major city" comment  about Boston.

“I’m happy to be here," Lue added.

Wade, who joined the Cavs this offseason after one season in Chicago following a career spent in Miami, was more willing to cut Irving some slack — to a point.

“I’ve always tried not to be too, me personally, oversensitive to what I read or what somebody says because I wasn’t there when they said it,” Wade told ESPN. “Because you just don’t know. Boston is a big sports town. It has the history there. … If you’re Cleveland and the way they were left, you read it one way. If you’re a sports fan somewhere else, you read it another way."

That said, Wade added, he's careful with what he says.

“My thing has always been — even in Miami — first of all, you never know where you’re going to be, what’s going to happen, where you’re going to end up, who you’re going to be teammates with,” Wade said. “You just never know those things, so I never want to leave a place and talk s— about a place."

Case in point: Irving returns to Cleveland for the Celtics regular-season opener Tuesday, and he can expect to get an earful.

First, Irving shocked the Cavs this past summer, requesting a trade away from LeBron James. Then Wednesday, he threw the whole city of Cleveland under the bus by saying of Boston: "It’s a really major city. Coming from Cleveland, the Midwest, where the culture is different, and then you move to the East Coast — into Boston — and it’s so real [and] alive. An ongoing, thriving city. Consistently. No matter what hour throughout the night.

"You would go to Cleveland, and it would be at nighttime, and things would be going on, but you just see a vast difference in terms of what the Midwest is — Cleveland — and what Boston is. Boston, I’m driving in and [thinking], ‘I’m really playing in a real, live sports city?’ And a great city."

In a farewell Instagram post after the trade to the Celtics, Irving lauded how great the city of Cleveland and people have been to him. After Wednesday's comments, the passionate Cleveland fan base might have found a new basketball enemy.