Top 100 NBA Players: #33 - Paul Pierce

Paul Pierce

Paul Pierce is best known today as a member of Boston's "Big Three," the three superstars that were brought together in 2007 and brought a championship to Boston in 2008, and he's also known as the one chosen from among those three to win the Finals MVP Award that season, which leads many to believe that before the arrival of Garnett and Allen that Pierce and the Celtics couldn't win, but that isn't exactly true.

Pierce hit his peak as a player from 2001-2003, back when Antoine Walker was also playing in Boston, and the Celtics were actually a pretty good team. They won playoff series in both of those seasons, and even reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2002, with Pierce as the team leader. Here are his combined stats from those two seasons:

Pierce - 26.0 pts, 7.1 reb, 3.8 ast, 1.8 stl, 0.9 blk, .429 FG%, .360 3P%, .805 FT%

Other than the field goal percentage, which was pretty low even for a guard, Pierce was great all-around. He did manage to improve his shooting over the course of the next 11 seasons, and he kept most of the other numbers relatively close to that level for as long as he stayed in Boston.

He remained one of the better players in the league for the next few seasons, but the Celtics started to slide, so they picked up a couple of stars to help share the load, and the result was their first title in two decades. Pierce was named the MVP of the Finals, but Kevin Garnett should have won it, as the numbers from that year's playoffs show:

Garnett - 20.4 pts, 10.5 reb, 3.3 ast, 1.3 stl, 1.1 blk, .495 FG%, .810 FT%
Pierce - 19.7 pts, 5.0 reb, 4.6 ast, 1.1 stl, 0.3 blk, .441 FG%, .802 FT%

A quick glance at those numbers shows that Garnett was by far the better player, performing better in every key category but one, assists, and that one was pretty close. I believe the reason Pierce won was his "comeback" from a "major injury" in game 1, which exhibited worse acting than a lot of reality shows. He couldn't even get up and walk off the court, but just minutes later he was back and scored 15 points in the third quarter to lead them to victory.

In 2010 Boston made another trip to the Finals, and people once again talked as if Pierce was the star of that team and the driving force behind it, but I showed earlier in my article about Rajon Rondo (#58) that the star power of the team had shifted to the point guard position. That's not to say the Pierce wasn't important on those Finals teams, because any team needs at least two stars to get to the Finals in today's league, and Pierce was one of them on both of those teams.