Paul Pierce getting No. 34 retired this season

New rule to retiring numbers: you don’t have to wait very long to do it after all.

The Boston Red Sox went ahead and retired David Ortiz’ number in June. It really felt like he hadn’t been on the team in forever, so it made sense. The Boston Celtics, AKA the local basketball team, decided to follow the same sort of track when it came to retiring Paul Pierce’s number.

https://twitter.com/AdamHimmelsbach/status/898208153610924033

That’s right. The dude who tried running for senator said it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSWjxTo57eg

He didn’t listen to Celtics fans when they wanted to keep Antoine Walker (although I’m almost certain he actually had nothing to do with that), so they didn’t listen to his pleas for votes. It’s a two-way street, buddy.

Normally, I don’t trust politicians further than I can throw them, but he never got elected and actually owns the Celtics, so I don’t see how he would benefit from lying about this. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt this time. After all, Pierce was good enough to get his number retired by the Celtics and it probably has been long enough.

His last game with the Celtics came in 2013. Then he was sacrificed along with KG and J-Terry for some draft picks. Essentially, they bought on the past. To a degree, it made sense. Pierce was a 10-time All-Star and 2008 NBA champion.

Just in case you forgot how good Pierce was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh0YxMd3FfU

You might also remember that Pierce officially retired just this year as a member of the Celtics. He did one of those honorary contract retirement things that we’ve seen the Patriots do a lot recently and that the Red Sox did with Nomar awhile back for some reason, even though Nomar was a terrible teammate in Boston…

The date for Pierce’s number retirement is TBD.