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Celtics legend Paul Pierce will head to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend after his 19-year career in the NBA, 15 of which with Boston. With that comes a career overhaul that has brought him to this pinnacle of the sport.
But that career almost took a major turn in 2007 when Pierce attempted to make his way to Dallas in a trade, something Chris Mannix wrote in a cover story for Sports Illustrated about Pierce entering the Hall.
In the spring of 2007, Pierce met Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in Las Vegas. Pierce said in Cuba: I am your missing piece. Pierce prompted Schwartz to attempt to arrange a trade with Dallas. “I’m in the prime of my life and watching all these other guys in the playoffs,” says Pierce. “It was depressing. I thought I was out of there. I thought it was over.
Then Mark Cuban confirmed the story and said it was closer than anyone thought, but also said it was years later than when Pierce remembers.
It gets better. We made a deal. We did a 3-way swap. All the teams have accepted their end of the bargain. When we got the commercial call, the 3rd team killed the deal because they didn’t know a premiere was going to the Celtics. They chose not to close the deal at all.
– Mark Cuban (@mcuban) September 7, 2021
It was after 2008.
– Mark Cuban (@mcuban) September 7, 2021
In the summer of 2007, Danny Ainge organized trades to bring Kevin Garnett from Minnesota and Ray Allen from Seattle to Boston. It is unlikely that Pierce tried to force his exit at this point. The rest is history: Pierce, KG and Allen won a title for the Celtics in 2008, and now all three are in the Hall of Fame.
Ultimately, the Celtics traded Pierce to Brooklyn in 2013. Kidd was in Dallas until 2012. So somewhere between 2008 and 2012 it all went down.
Kidd and Nowitzki won a title in 2011 without Pierce. Had the trade been successful, Pierce would have added another major scoring threat and shot-maker, making the Mavericks a serious threat to win a title, even as their stars aged. Dallas would have been great.
Instead, add this trade to the huge stack of quasi-deals that would have reshaped the NBA had they come together.
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