On the most recent episode of Kevin Garnett‘s “KG Certified” podcast, Garnett was joined by former Boston Celtics teammate and noted guy who has a bit too much fun on these things Paul Pierce to discuss an issue near and dear to the hearts of many basketball players: the referees.
Any time a bunch of old NBA players get together to talk about stuff in a public forum, someone will invariably bring up something that gets everyone laughing really hard. In the conversation between Garnett and Pierce, the former NBA champions spoke about how — as Garnett put it — “old school refs used to talk crazy.” The pair went through a long list of older referees that had no problem chirping back at players who weren’t happy with them, and with seemingly every name, one of the two would crack up.
NBA refs used to talk CRAZY.
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Pierce really loved Garnett talking about Hugh Hollins, while Garnett revealed that Steve Javie used to basically say to players that he wished they’d try something with him. But the best, unsurprisingly, was Garnett telling the legendary story about how Joey Crawford — who he referred to as “a gangster” — once gave Tim Duncan a technical foul for laughing at him from the bench. I sincerely hope this leads to a lengthy podcast series where ex-players spend entire episodes telling stories about how insane old referees were.