Paul Pierce wonders if Lakers' LeBron James voted him as the GOAT
25/04/2024 02:08
During a recent poll conducted by The Athletic, it turned out that former Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce got a lone vote for the Greatest of All Time honor from an unnamed player. Could that lone vote be from Los Angeles Lakers superstar forward LeBron James? Pierce is not eliminating that theory.
While on Tuesday’s episode of FS1’s Undisputed, Pierce wondered about the possibility that it was the leader of the Lakers who cast that GOAT vote.
“What if LBJ voted for me?” Pierce asked Keyshawn Johnson and Skip Bayless. “I played against him, he must think something. What do you think about that? What do you think about that? We had a lot of battles. Come on now, we had some tough battles. We had some tough battles. It could have been LB.”
"Sometimes it's not always everything you do on the court, but off the court too that makes you the GOAT." – Paul Pierce pic.twitter.com/hdghpDbv4A
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) April 24, 2024
Was it LeBron James who voted for Paul Pierce as the GOAT?
Indeed, long before James first signed with the Lakers, he and Pierce used to have plenty of head-to-heads back in their days in the Eastern Conference when the four-time league Most Valuable Player was still suiting up for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Miami Heat. James is definitely familiar with what type of a basketball player Pierce was on the court and he can’t deny that Pierce was a terrific baller and fierce competitor. After all, Pierce has an NBA ring, is a 10-time NBA All-Star, and is part of the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.
All that being said, it is still surprising to many to see Pierce get a vote as the greatest basketball player to ever set foot on a court. That vote must have been from someone who didn’t take the exercise too seriously. Imagine all the legends of the game that that voter had to mentally ignore in order to come down with a conclusion that Pierce is the all-time best player in basketball history. That means, that from that voter’s perspective, based on his vote, Pierce had a better career than the likes of Lakers great Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Tim Duncan, among others, and let alone Michael Jordan and James.
Pierce did not directly say it, but he must have been just as surprised as so many people when he learned that someone actually voted for him as the GOAT.
“Hey, man, I got 0.8% of the votes for the goat, Pierce added. “Listen, it’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. I got a vote, to get one vote,
Pierce also believed that his legacy would have been so much better, and by that, he meant finishing his career with many more NBA titles, if he had played with more talented players around him.
“Hey, they knew if I had better players around me when I was younger, I probably would’ve won about five or six championships, too. ”
James, who got the second-most votes in the poll behind His Airness, has yet to be asked whether it’s him who wrote Pierce’s name on the ballot, but it’s also not the best time for someone to ask him that, considering how bad it is looking at the moment for the Lakers. Los Angeles has lost both its first two games in the first round of the 2024 NBA Playoffs against the reigning NBA champions Denver Nuggets.
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