With both the Eastern and Western Conference Finals still being played, the NBA is seemingly already looking ahead to a Finals matchup between Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and the Dallas Mavericks and a loaded, 64-win Boston Celtics squad. Naturally, this is for good reason: in the long history of the NBA Playoffs, not a single one of the 154 teams that have fallen into an 0-3 hole in a postseason series have managed to win four straight. So sure, for all intents and purposes, we can probably safely begin to look ahead toward that matchup.

Following the Mavericks' Game 3 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday night, Paul Pierce joined the desk on FS1's “Undisputed” and backtracked on a take he made earlier in the season. Back in December, Pierce claimed that Luka Doncic, as well as Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo couldn't be the face of the NBA. Naturally, the assumption was that this claim was rooted in a bias against internationally-born players, but here's how Pierce tried to explain it away:

“When we talk about the best players, or the league is becoming a European League, and our top Europeans Luka and Joker, Giannis. They could care less about the All-Star Game and that’s fine but how can I see one of them as the face of the league? You know what I’m saying? With that type of attitude, I can't like see one of them being the face.”

On Monday morning, Paul Pierce showed a change of heart, claiming that there was a path for Luka Doncic to take hold of this imaginary distinction.

 

In a roundabout way, I actually do agree with Paul Pierce… if Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks get the job done in the NBA Finals in June, you would be able to make a pretty strong case that Doncic would be the face of the NBA. But even without the chip, why can't this be true?

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What does “The Face of the NBA” even mean? 

The “Face of the NBA” discourse is broken. Here's how I know this: at the tail end of the video I embedded above, Paul Pierce makes the claim that Jayson Tatum, with an NBA Championship and Finals MVP, would be crowned the best player in the world and the face of the NBA. Even though Tatum is a fantastic player who is among the ten best players in the league, this is objectively false on both counts. He's not a better player, or a more popular player than Luka Doncic.

Of course, because this conversation is taking place on a show like “Undisputed,” which many sports fans have been brainwashed into believing this is how sports discourse is supposed to go because so many shows have an embrace debate slant nowadays, it badly skews the entire narrative, leaving it going in a direction that it should never have gone in in the first place.

The “Rings” argument is arguably the worst thing that has happened to the NBA. It's responsible for a collective mindset that all players who don't win an NBA Title are, pardon my French, shit, while everyone who has won a ring has seemingly had their existence in the NBA validated. Had this been the case in the past, we wouldn't remember historically great players who failed to win an NBA Title — think Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Karl Malone and John Stockton, Steve Nash, Elgin Baylor, and many, many others — in such a fond light. They'd be relegated to a separate conversation entirely, one that focused solely on their flaws and “lack of a clutch gene” instead of their accomplishments and what made them such iconic players in the first place.

And let's not ignore that making a point like this is an act of self-service for Pierce, who to his credit, has an NBA Finals MVP under his belt. In some backwards way of thinking, Pierce probably believes that because a loaded Celtics team won the NBA Title in 2008 and because he was named the Finals MVP, that made him the face of the NBA for the thinnest sliver of time. But of course, anyone who lived through that and watched how it all unfolded knows the truth (pun intended) — Kevin Garnett was the best, most valuable, and most iconic member of the 2008 Celtics.