Paul Pierce questions Nets and opines on many more teammates
Paul Pierce made news in the summer of 2013 when he accepted and welcomed a trade from the Boston Celtics, the only team he had known in his NBA career, to the Brooklyn Nets. The idea was that Pierce and Kevin Garnett would help the Nets compete for a championship — instead, they struggled to the sixth seed in a top-heavy East, defeated the Toronto Raptors in seven games in the first round, and won just a single game against the Miami Heat before elimination. Pierce left Brooklyn for the Washington Wizards as a free agent this summer, and virtually no one would call his single season with the Nets a resounding success.
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However, Pierce has not gotten especially specific about what went wrong with the Nets, merely making a goofy-but-true joke about how much they miss him and going about his business with the Wizards. That has changed now. In a new feature by Jackie MacMullan for ESPN.com, Pierce opens up about his experiences with past teammates and what he expects out of his young teammates in Washington. The attention-grabbing quotes concern the Nets:
"I'm much happier,'' he said. "It was a tough situation (in Brooklyn) last year. Horrible, really.
"It was just the guys' attitudes there. It wasn't like we were surrounded by a bunch of young guys. They were vets who didn't want to play and didn't want to practice. I was looking around saying, 'What's this?' Kevin (Garnett) and I had to pick them up every day in practice.
"If me and Kevin weren't there, that team would have folded up. That team would have packed it in. We kept them going each and every day.'' [...]
"Before I got there, I looked at Deron [Williams] as an MVP candidate,'' Pierce said. "But I felt once we got there, that's not what he wanted to be. He just didn't want that.
"I think a lot of the pressure got to him sometimes. This was his first time in the national spotlight. The media in Utah is not the same as the media in New York, so that can wear on some people. I think it really affected him.'' [...]
"There's a lot of secondary guys on that team. KG and I went there looking at them as the main guys who would push us, because we were advancing in years. But we ended up doing all the pushing.''
These comments seem harsh, but that's only because players rarely speak out in such specific terms. Anyone who has watched the Nets in the last few seasons will see some truth in these statements. Despite a roster full of veterans with reputations as competitors, the Nets — out of the playoff picture at the No. 9 spot as of this writing — have consistently looked to be going through the motions. The 2013-14 group was especially disappointing given expectations, and Pierce's explanation isn't especially shocking. Deron Williams really has seemed to regress in the last two seasons, and the Nets have not exactly looked to have much intensity without Pierce and Garnett this year.
It's tempting to explain away Pierce's comments as a product of a cliched old-school mindset that has expressed itself via bizarre opinions that he wouldn't be drafted in today's NBA and that younger players don't talk trash because they play too many video games. But he's talking about veterans here, not whippersnappers. Plus, when Pierce does address the mindsets of up-and-coming stars in MacMullan's piece, he at least allows for the possibility that they can transcend the supposed limits of their culture:
"I talk to them a lot about mental preparation and consistency,'' Pierce said. "I keep telling Wall and Beal, 'You've got to make up your mind. Do you want to be good, or do you want to be great? Because if you want to be great, you gotta do it every single night, not just when you feel like it.'
"Both of those guys have the potential to be great. I love them. But sometimes I'm not sure they realize what it takes.
"That was (Rajon) Rondo's problem, too. Some days he did, some days he didn't. I think it's more this generation. A lot of these players have been catered to since the sixth grade. The NBA is changing so much. It's not like when I came up, with that old-school mentality that practice really mattered. You've got these 24, 25 year old guys who sit out of practice now to rest. It's hard for me to understand, but I'm trying.'' [...]
Some of his young teammates can recount his battles with LeBron, both in Miami and Cleveland, nearly verbatim. They bring up Christmas Day performances that Pierce had long forgotten. The camaraderie, he said, is refreshing.
Pierce still comes across as a bit detached from his own reality — he was pretty famous before his NBA career, too, and found his career in a holding pattern before Garnett joined the Celtics — but he seems to acknowledge that the differences between his era and the present are not so vast that they must impede all relationships between younger and older players.
There's a lot more in MacMullan's feature — including some useful context for Pierce's lack of communication with former teammate Ray Allen — so it's worth reading it in full. But the broadest takeaway may be that one of the league's elder statesmen is beginning to realize that his perspective is not inherently better than that of his star successors.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at efreeman_ysports@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
