Friday night on ESPN, Paul Pierce declared he had a better career than Dwyane Wade has with the Miami Heat. Was he right, or off-base? Let’s take a look.
During ESPN’s NBA Countdown on Friday night, a panel of Paul Pierce, Jalen Rose, Brian Windhorst, and host Michelle Beadle discussed how Dwyane Wade‘s career stacked up against other all-time greats. The Miami Heat legend was compared to Isiah Thomas, Allen Iverson, braids versus no braids, among other comparisons. In most of these cases, the panel was generally split.
As the final comp, Paul Pierce was asked by host Michelle Beadle who had the better career between himself and Wade. Not missing a beat or pausing for even a split second, Pierce insisted that he had the better career of the two players.
“That’s easy!” he exclaimed. “I could say that off the bat. That’s me.”
Pierce’s own argument focused on how much better he could have been if he had teammates like Shaquille O’Neal and LeBron James and Chris Bosh, especially in his youth like Wade had with O’Neal. “When I’m 24 years old, give me Shaq. If I’m 24, 25 years old, you give me LeBron, Bosh, I’d be sitting on five or six championships,” Pierce said.
Certainly, having the best players in the NBA in their prime as teammates would have boosted Pierce’s ring count. But if we’re talking about who HAD the better career, rather than who WOULD have had the better career if we went back and changed history, we might want to pump the brakes on Paul Pierce’s argument.
Wade has more All Star appearances (13 to 10), more championships (three to one), more first and second All NBA teams (combined five to one), was a scoring championship and was named to three NBA All Defensive second teams (Pierce was never named to an All Defensive team).
Pierce did score 3,332 more points than Wade, but it also took 293 more games to do it. So even there, Wade has averaged 22 points per game to Pierce’s 19.3 points per game.
All that said, Pierce was a better shooter and could probably be a more natural off-ball complementary piece than Wade, so his argument that he would have thrived if he had the same teammates as Wade did with the Miami Heat does hold water.
However, what he’s actually insisting here is that he could have been a better second option than Wade. It might be true, but without that time machine to go back and find out, all we have are the facts at hand.
Paul Pierce had a tremendous career, one that should never be denigrated.
But was it better than Dwyane Wade’s career? Well, that’s easy.