Paul Pierce, LeBron James
Photo via boston.com

In April of this year former NBA star Paul Pierce was forced to leave ESPN where he served as analyst since 2021 after he streamed a controversial video on Instagram featuring women in bikinis while he was drinking alcohol and smoking blunt.

According to Pierce himself, ESPN wasn’t a great fit for him due to the rules he had to follow. “It wasn’t a great fit. There’s a lot of stuff over there that you can’t say. And you have to talk about LeBron all the time,” he told Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated.

Pierce, who an NBA championship in 2008 with the Boston Celtics, worked for ESPN since 2017. He was an analyst on the network’s basketball programs The Jump and NBA Countdown.