After months of reports that Cleveland Cavaliers superstar LeBron James was not in favor of the team trading away its star point guard in Kyrie Irving, James, himself, has now admitted as much.

"Even if you start back to the summertime where I felt like it was just bad for our franchise just to be able to trade away our superstar point guard," James saind in an interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols. "A guy that I had been in so many battles with over the last three years, and obviously I wasn't a part of the communications and know exactly what went on between the two sides. But I just felt like it was bad timing for our team."

Before the Cavaliers dealt Irving to the Boston Celtics ahead of the 2017-18 season, it was widely reported that the star point guard had requested Cavaliers management to trade him to another team. With Irving no longer in the fold, James and the Cavaliers finished the regular season fourth in the Eastern Conference standings, and were pushed to brink of elimination in two of their three series this postseason.

Irving averaged 24.4 points per game and 5.1 assists while appearing in 51 games for the Celtics during the regular season, and was named an all-star for the fifth time in his career. A knee surgery kept him out for most of the regular season and all of the postseason.

Besides revealing his feelings on the Irving trade, James also revealed told Nichols that ahead of the 2017-18 season, he himself did not expect the Cavaliers to wind up playing in the Finals.

"So I felt like the odds were against us from the summer," James said. "And then you know we come into the season, and our All-Star point guard that we got from Boston [Isaiah Thomas] wasn't able to play until January. We just had so many things going with our team. We shuffled in different lineups, we shuffled in different players, we made a trade at the deadline, and I can't sit here right now and say that the Finals was a part of my thinking."

The Cavaliers take on the Golden State Warriors in the Finals for the fourth consecutive time starting tonight in Game 1, which can be seen on TSN.