Paul Pierce originally thought he’d wind up re-signing with the Nets, but he tells TNT’s David Aldridge that Brooklyn never made an offer, as Aldridge writes in his Morning Tip column for NBA.com. Pierce said the Clippers looked like Plan B, but the Nets wouldn’t accommodate a sign-and-trade once Doc Rivers used the team’s mid-level exception on Spencer Hawes instead.
“You know what, I didn’t know what to expect,” Pierce said. “Brooklyn’s been, or New Jersey, Brooklyn, they’re a franchise that’s going in a different direction, I think. They said they wanted to cut costs; they felt like they weren’t going to be a contender. Right now, they’re kind of in the middle right now. And I really didn’t want to be in the middle. I didn’t know if they wanted to do a sign-and-trade. I had to make my own destiny. I couldn’t put it in the faith of somebody else. And that’s when I was like, I’m coming here [to the Wizards].”
The reference to New Jersey seems like a subtle twist of the knife on Pierce’s part, given the desire of Nets brass to establish the Brooklyn monicker, as Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News points out. Here’s more from around the Atlantic.
- Nets union representative Deron Williams believes the league and the players are on a path toward a work stoppage in 2017, noting that preparing for one was the focus of a union meeting in July, as he told reporters, including Bondy, who writes in a separate piece.
- Carmelo Anthony said today that he had no interest this summer in signing a two-year deal, as LeBron James and others did, to take advantage of the influx of TV revenues, notes Chris Herring of The Wall Street Journal (Twitter link).
- The Celtics had hoped to find a way to keep Chris Johnson amid the flurry of transactions surrounding the Keith Bogans trade, notes A. Sherrod Blakely of CSNNE.com. The Sixers claimed him off waivers after the C’s let him go.