Washington Wizards veteran Paul Pierce has called out a number of his former teammates at the Brooklyn Nets and insists he and Kevin Garnett held it together.
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Both Pierce and Garnett made the switch to the Nets from the Boston Celtics hoping to make another late championship push together on an expensively assembled roster.
However, it didn’t go according to plan under rookie coach Jason Kidd, and although Brooklyn recovered after a poor start to the regular season to make the playoffs, they didn’t go much further.
Pierce has now broken his silence on what his year at the Barclays Center was like, and feels as though a lot of the other players on the roster were a let-down.
“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,” Pierce told ESPN.
“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.”
Pierce also explained his belief that point guard Deron Williams was unable to handle the pressure of playing in a big market as ultimately he went from an MVP candidate to one of the biggest disappointments of the season.
However, it wasn’t just all down to him as the NBA champion insisted that both he and Garnett moved to Brooklyn thinking that the players would be pushing them as they came to the end of their respective careers, but it ended up being the other way around.
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