Paul Pierce successfully canceled a planned Isaiah Thomas video tribute that would have coincided with his Boston Celtics jersey retirement, and Jalen Rose thinks it’s petty. Not only that, but he told Pierce that’s what he thought, to his face, while on national television.
Jalen Rose told Paul Pierce he’s ‘petty’ for canceling Isaiah Thomas’ video tribute
Rose called Pierce ‘petty’ to his face on ESPN’s pregame show.
On Thursday’s ESPN NBA Countdown, Rose was asked about the mild controversy and addressed it with Pierce, another ESPN analyst, sitting at the same table. Seeing Pierce react in real time to being called “petty” is simply incredible television, there’s no doubt about that.
Let’s take another look at his face.
To recap what exactly happened: Isaiah Thomas’ video tribute from the Celtics was originally supposed to happen on Jan. 3, when the Cavaliers visited Boston. However, Thomas sat out that game, the second night of a doubleheader, after making his season debut the night before. Thomas requested that the Celtics not play his video tribute on a night where he was inactive, which meant that Boston pushed it back to the only other evening where Cleveland visited.
Unfortunately, the other game doubled as Pierce’s jersey retirement ceremony. That week, Pierce said that he didn’t want to share his retirement ceremony with anyone else — even if a video tribute could be done in a single timeout — and the Celtics heard him. They canceled the video altogether, and almost simultaneously, Thomas tweeted that he didn’t need a video tribute at all.
So Pierce gets what he wants, and Thomas will get only cheers from Boston, where he finished fifth in MVP voting while playing for them last season and also suited up for playoff game one day after his sister tragically died in a car accident. That’s fine — a video tribute is a relatively new fad, but teams and fan bases can express how they feel about a former player in a hundred other ways, too.
However, as SB Nation’s own Tom Ziller points out, it does reveal Pierce’s selfishness, among other things.
1. Pierce was ridiculously selfish.
Pierce’s attitude is straight out of central casting for the villain role in a soft-feature teen movie about prom drama. Come on, Truth. This one-minute tribute to a dude who played through what Isaiah Thomas played through last spring is stealing too much spotlight from your big day?
I’ll let you read the rest of Ziller’s piece instead of editorializing myself. But that was amazing television, and props to Jalen Rose for saying how he really felt.
