MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Even at the start, Paul Pierce was the one who seemed as if it took a crane and a team of plow horses to keep his smile intact. The day in July when the Nets unveiled the jewels of their offseason acquisitions, they all assumed certain personas almost immediately.
Kevin Garnett had his game face on. “What’s up, Brooklyn?” he crowed, to the great delight of the fans and team officials who had assembled under the klieg lights cheek-by-jowl with the media.
Jason Terry was chatty and charming, and spoke so effusively of his new boss, Jason Kidd, he sounded like a sophomore buttering up the varsity coach for playing time.
Pierce?
Put it this way: Tony Bennett might have left his heart in a city where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars. But Pierce had left his in the Olde Towne, in the Hub, in an arena where he helped hang a 17th banner and where fans had grown to revere him fervently, assuring his No. 34 will someday reside amid those very same rafters.
“I’m no longer a Boston Celtic,” Pierce said that day, as if saying the words would finally make it all real. “I’m a Brooklyn Net.” The cheering was immediate, and it obscured the fact Pierce’s smile had involuntarily morphed into a reflective, pensive look, and it also camouflaged what he said next: “That’s what it is right now.”
And what he said after that: “It’s a business. At some point we all have to move on.”
And then: “I’m trying to create some kind of legacy here in Brooklyn.”
OK, there’s nothing easier than digging out four-month-old quotes and plumbing them for irony. That’s the way of the world in spots, after all — expectations unmet, declarations undone, words thrown in faces like drinks at a cocktail party.
And there’s this: Pierce and the others still have a chance to establish that legacy, even if they are only 5-12 after pounding the Grizzlies Saturday, 97-88, while Pierce sat with a bruised right hand. The fact remains they picked a hell of a year to stumble out of the gate, when the Eastern Conference (excepting Miami and Indiana) is woeful and the Atlantic Division (excepting nobody) is a grisly assemblage of middling teams.
“I’ve been in this situation before,” Pierce said earlier this week. “I was with a Boston team [in 2011] that was under .500 going into the All-Star break. We weren’t playing well. But you look up playoff time, we were one quarter away from being in the Finals.”
That’s one benefit of having so much experience stuffed on the same roster. A lot of Nets who can offer similar examples of similar adversities handled and beaten. Surely that’s a large measure of why these players were so attractive to general manager Billy King that he paid a premium to import them. Pierce hardly is alone as a cause for this woeful start, even if he has struggled badly the past two weeks, missing 82 of his past 119 shots from the field, and 32 of his last 42 3s.
He just seems … what? Unhappy? Bored? Aloof? Disengaged?
Homesick?
It actually was quite stirring to watch Pierce’s career unfold in Boston, from the ashes of the failed Rick Pitino Experience to the brink of the Finals with Antoine Walker as his wingman, from the bottoming-out in 2006 to the championship of 2007 and a permanent place in the heart of New England.
There had been times when Pierce nearly was run out of Boston. When he finally left, it seemed he might personally email every Celtics fan a thank-you note.
“Boston was a special place,” Pierce said, as if anyone needed convincing that he found it a cross between Emerald City and Xanadu. “It is a special place.”
A place that had to be hard to leave. Yet, at that same gathering in July, Pierce revealed it was he who spent 90 minutes convincing Garnett to waive his no-trade clause so the two could take their show out of town, out to Brooklyn, not the other way around, as it has seemed across every second since. He even may have thought it was a good idea at the time.
And maybe he will again. It is, after all, still very, very early.
“I know it’s eventually going to turn around,” Pierce said.
Maybe Saturday night in Memphis was the start of that turnaround. And maybe Pierce will even be ready to join the mission himself sometime soon.