King: Numbers Didn’t Work to Keep Pierce

(Brooklyn Nets GM Billy) King indicated in June that he wanted to re-sign Pierce.

“That was the plan of attack,” King said Monday at an NBA Cares event on Staten Island. “And I think as we started negotiations, with the numbers that they asked for, I thought at one point he was definitely leaving. You start switching gears because you start hearing that he’s going to end up in another place, so you have to start preparing.”

King said Pierce’s representatives circled back to the Nets, but they already had plans to retool the roster in other ways, operating under the notion that Pierce’s bags were packed.

“It was his first time ever being a free agent, and so I think he was exploring all his options,” King said. “I thought that there were a lot of teams that had put offers on the table or were talking to him. I really thought that he was going to end up someplace else. I don’t know who, but it was one [free agent] player signed and things quickly changed. We had already started preparing that he was already not going to be back.”

via Roderick Boone of Newsday