Before Paul Pierce was a Celtic, he was a Jayhawk.
“When we were recruiting Paul, we had a pretty good team we knew would be coming back,” Roy Williams, head coach of Kansas at the time, told Boston.com. “We had two big guys and we had two guards, but we had no small forward — small forward, big guard — and I just thought he was the best in the country.”
Pierce was a McDonald’s All-American coming out of Inglewood High School in 1995, but that esteemed status wasn’t always the case. According to his high school basketball coach, Patrick Roy, 14-year-old Pierce was “a real chunky kid” who left a lot to be desired on the court.