Paul Pierce lost his job at ESPN back in April after posting a video of himself at a poker game, smoking what appeared to be weed and seeming to enjoy the services of several strippers. Since then, the ex-basketball star says he has been doing fine. And it is all thanks to crypto.
In a recent Tweet, Pierce called out ESPN saying: "@espn I don’t need you. I got @ethereum_max I made more money with this crypto in the past month then [sic] I did with y’all in a year. TRUTH shall set u Free. My own Boss."
Then he linked to the Ethereum Max website. The Tweet, which came out of nowhere, has some of the flavor of a celebrity endorsement. The folks at Ethereum Max have not commented on whether Pierce has any formal affiliation with them.
Pierce does have a more formal deal with Virtue Poker, which is based around the main Ethereum blockchain. Virtue Poker has its own tokens and uses a decentralized system to shuffle the deck. Even so, critics were quick to slam Pierce's crypto chops.
Ty Smith, the managing partner at Coinbound, replied to Pierce and cautioned readers. Smith said, "Here’s a warning for those that aren’t familiar with crypto from someone who is: DO NOT invest in @ethereum_max. This is about to pump and the dump HARD. You will lose money."
There is no hard evidence of that claim beyond the superficial similarities between $eMAX and other pump and dump schemes. However, caveat emptor, pal — investments can go down as well as up.
Smith then compared the situation to Mayweather and DJ Khalid's involvement in Centra three years ago. Mayweather and Khalid settled with the SEC over failure to disclose their sponsorship with Centra when they were touting it on social media.
Paul Pierce's ESPN firing
Pierce worked as an NBA analyst at ESPN, where he was the basketball expert on The Shot and NBA Countdown.
Though the video appeared to be the proximate cause of his firing, Pierce was struggling with the work at ESPN. He misreported the winners of a game in one appearance, shortly before the video landed.
ESPN was tight-lipped about the exact reasons for Pierce's firing. It may be that the stripper, smoking, and gambling video fell foul of ESPN's archaic morality clauses, and Pierce got the boot. However, the New York Post reported that ESPN was "miffed" at Pierce posting the video on his accord. The suggestion was that if ESPN had got the scoop, he might still be on air miscalling game results.
The reality is that there's nothing much in the Instagram videos that should scandalize ESPN. Prissily sanctioning strippers, weed, and poker would seem a little disingenuous. Especially coming from the channel covers the cheerleading displays at the NFL, shows Superbowl ads for pharmaceuticals and beer, and for decades carried the World Series Of Poker.
Either way, it sounds like Pierce has landed on his feet with crypto. For now.
Featured image source: Flickr by Ivan Radic
