Old Man Paul Pierce blames ‘computers’ for less NBA trash talk
At 37 years old, Washington Wizards wing Paul Pierce is one of the oldest and most experienced players in the NBA. He has seen several eras of the league over his career, from the end of Michael Jordan’s dominance to the peak of the Kobe-Shaq Lakers to his own Celtics’ period of contention and beyond. It’s safe to say that he’s learned a lot over his 17 seasons and can supply the wisdom to prove it.
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Unfortunately, like many veterans and retired greats, The Truth’s perspective is more than a little biased when it comes to cultural changes that he perceives to have taken place since he came of basketball age. For instance, take the issue of trash talk. Pierce believes that players of today talk less smack than they did during his first years in the league, back when Gary Payton was the Mouth of the South Pacific Northwest and players presumably challenged each other’s manhood for 48 continuous minutes every night. Never fear, though, because he has figured out what is to blame — those new-fangled computers and video games (via PBT):
We’re pretty sure Pierce then left the interview area to play dominoes in the park with teammate Andre Miller.
The future Hall of Famer has spoken out about issues with the current era before, most recently when he said that he wouldn’t even have been drafted if he had entered the NBA as his college-aged self in today’s scouting climate. This claim was nonsense, because Pierce left Kansas in 1998 as a very skilled scorer with clear NBA-level athleticism. As our Kelly Dwyer said at the time, he came off as a cranky old man, not someone who had thought particularly hard about the criteria GMs use to assess draft prospects. If Pierce was right that front-office types take too many chances on high-potential projects, then he certainly would go higher than his spot of 10th overall if only because he had already fulfilled so much of his promise when he entered the league.
This claim regarding trash talk is more of the same. Even if we accept the claim that trash talk is not especially common in today’s league — arguable, if also somewhat convincing — it makes no sense to blame video games, because NBA players have been avid gamers since several years before Pierce’s rookie season. Yes, they were playing much less realistic versions of the games found on today’s systems, but that is irrelevant to the discussion. And, as anyone who has played one of these games knows, trash talk is pretty much essential to the experience. It might even be more important than beating your opponent.
Yet we should not single out Pierce for his errors, because we see this general line of thinking every time a player who experienced his prime in another era privileges the standards of his time over all others. It happens when Charles Barkley complains that the NBA-best Golden State Warriors shoot too many jumpers, or when Gary Payton declares that today’s NBA is just altogether awful. These are not reasonable arguments about basketball — they are attempts to remind everyone that these one-time superstars were really terrific at basketball.
They were amazing, of course, and we should respect and honor them for their accomplishments. (Pierce, to his credit, is still contributing for one of the East’s few genuinely impressive teams.) But that doesn’t have to mean we have to agree with them. They’re just as capable of being wrong as weaklings like me who haven’t played since ninth grade.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
