Ainge Recalls Some Of Bird's Best Trash Talking Moments

If you want to watch the video of Danny saying it, you have to go to the link.



http://www.csnne.com/blog/celtics-talk/ainge-recalls-birds-best-trash-talk-moments




Ainge recalls Bird's best trash-talk moments
October 2, 2014, 12:30 pm









If there are two things we know about Larry Bird, they are these: The man could play,  and the man could talk some trash.

Bird was a trash-talker, and one of the best according to most who shared the court with him.

If you were the opponent, you most likely walked off the court head down. If you were a teammate, like current Celtics President of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge, you most likely have story after story to tell about Bird just dominating the opposition both physically and mentally.

Ainge joined the guys on 98.5's The Toucher and Rich Show on Thursday, where he was asked to give his best example of seeing Bird get in the head of somebody because of his trash talk.

"I think the one where he told Dr. J [Julius Erving] to retire when Larry had about 35 [points] halfway though the third quarter that led to a fight, led to a really ugly fight," Ainge said. "Dr. J started punching him and a couple guys grabbed him."

Here's the video of that fight. You can see towards the end of the video Charles Barkley grab Bird around the neck and Erving start punching a defenseless Bird in the face. That would be a nice season-long suspension these days . . . (Note: Mike and Tommy calling the game!).




"But Larry did it out of boredom I always thought," Ainge continued. "I always thought he did it to keep himself interested. He didn't usually trash talk when we were in the NBA Finals or big playoff games. Mostly during a regular season game.

"But maybe my favorite was [against] Xavier McDaniel. Where we were down by one and we went to the sidelines with just a few seconds left in the game and a timeout and as he was walking off the court he told Xavier exactly what he was going to do: he was going to catch the ball here, fake here, and shoot here. And he came out and did exactly what he told Xavier what he was going to do before the timeout. Xavier thought he was setting him up, he thought he was just going to fake him. But no, Larry did exactly what he had said."

Here's the video of that one:





McDaniel said it best... "Damn!"




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