by Ray Allen
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t a liability on defense. Far from it.
In the 2001 playoffs against Philadelphia, I played Iverson about as tough as you can. Knowing his moves, I stayed in front of him. He got his points, averaging 30 per game, but he shot just 34 percent from the field. He wasn’t the only reason we lost the series.
Now, with Doc, I was finally with a coach who made defense the number-one priority, and a guy, KG, who was one of the better defensive players in the league. With them showing the way, in practice after practice, I worked harder than ever at that part of my game, and it paid off.
“We have to be the best defensive team in the NBA,” Doc used to tell us. “That’s what’s going to win us a championship.”
And to think that KG and I had felt that Doc was the one big unknown heading into the season. We knew he was a good person, but we had no idea what kind of coach he’d be. Plenty of former players weren’t the best coaches. KG was most concerned with how much running there would be in training camp. We’d been with coaches who ran us ragged. Our bodies were younger then.
Doc put us at ease right away.
“You guys are veterans,” he said. “I know the work you put in. There isn’t going to be a lot of running.”
He was just as understanding once the season began, making sure to conserve our energy. If we played on a Monday and Tuesday and the next game was on Thursday, the team wouldn’t practice on Wednesday and there wouldn’t be a shootaround on Thursday. He knew what it felt like to run out of energy in the fourth quarter, when most games are won or lost.
Our rest mattered so much that Doc brought in an actual sleep doctor, who put training aids on our heads to monitor if we were getting enough sleep. Unlike other teams I’d been on, I never caught anyone yawning in the gym. A lot of coaches assume that because we’re so gifted and athletic, we can do anything. I wish. Our bodies break down like everybody else’s. When I got home from practice, I needed a nap.
Doc treated us like men. Take, for instance, our practice schedule. He asked us what time we wanted to practice. He didn’t tell us. Other coaches tell you.
They tell you when to be at practice, when to be at the shootaround, when to be on the bus. There is very little they don’t tell you, and it’s no fun to be treated like that, believe me, especially if you have been in the league for a while. You begin to think you’re back in junior high. So, by allowing us to have a greater say, we did not feel like laborers serving ownership; we felt a sense of ownership ourselves, which makes a big difference. If you feel you own a piece of something, you will work harder to make it a success.
Doc also worked on our minds, as the top coaches in every sport do, looking for ways to make us feel as one.
The day before the team took off for Rome, he had KG, Paul, and me meet him at his apartment in Boston at 8:00 AM sharp. Hey, Doc, with all due respect, couldn’t this perhaps wait until the next day, or until later in the morning?
Apparently not. The three of us got there at eight, and the next thing we knew, a Duck Boat—one of those boats that can go on land or water—pulled up to where we were standing by Doc’s building. These were the boats the Patriots and Red Sox rode on during their championship parades.
Get on board, Doc said. He wasn’t kidding. With the whole boat to ourselves, we made our way slowly through the neighborhoods, and then down an embankment and into the water. He didn’t wait long to make his point. He rarely did.
“This is what we’re going to do at the end of the year,” he said, “and it’s important that you guys know what it feels like.”
I’m not sure what KG and Paul thought about taking this unexpected tour of the city, but I thought it was a wonderful idea.
Basketball is a business—I am not suggesting otherwise—but sometimes you have to be corny and be willing to feel like a kid again. Doc understood the right balance between fun and hard work. If we lost a few games in a row, he would cancel practice and take us to a movie or come up with another activity to get our minds away from the game.
Most coaches I’ve been around would never dare try something like that. They play by the book, from the first day of training camp to the last game of the season.
A break? You guys don’t need a break. You need to work harder. See you at the facility an hour earlier tomorrow, and be ready to do some extra running. I don’t care how long we have to stay here—we will turn this thing around!
Such a hard-line approach will not pay off. Remember, we’re not robots.
Sitting in the Duck Boat, I felt part of something larger than myself.
Not that I didn’t feel part of something larger in Milwaukee and Seattle. The difference was that here, in Boston, with this coach, this group of players, and these fans, I felt it more intensely than ever. We were on a mission to win a championship, led by a coach who helped us see more than what was in front of us at the moment.
Would we get there? It was impossible to know. The bounces might go our way, or they might not. Somebody could get hurt. Somebody could lose focus. There is only so much under your control.
Yet the fact that the organization had the resources to take us on the Duck Boat ride proved it would possess the resources for another trip, to the Finals, to be followed by another boat ride in June.
First things first. Off to Rome we went, where we bonded in ways I don’t believe we would have if we had remained at our practice facility in Waltham, outside of Boston. Separated from family and friends, we were forced to extend ourselves to one another. You spend so much time with your teammates you think you know them. You don’t. But far from home, with no place you have to be, you learn who they are and what they want.
We spent hours sitting on the famous Spanish Steps, doing little but watch people go by. Curious, as usual, I rented a scooter on the second day and parked it outside the hotel. Every day, after practice, I drove around to see the Rome where people work and live, not just the tourist attractions.
From Rome, we headed to London for another exhibition game. Then it was back to the United States. We’d been gone two weeks, though it felt a lot longer, in a good way; that’s how much we had grown as a team.
The 2007–08 season was about to start. For the first time in my career, I was in a place where people expected us to do something special.
I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
12
Ring in the New Year
Opening night in Boston was quite a night. The fans cheered for us louder than any fans I’d been around, and it would be that loud the whole season. Every night, even on nights when it was obvious we didn’t have our best stuff, they were loyal to the very end, willing us to wins we probably didn’t deserve.
“Is it always like this?” the Rockets’ Tracy McGrady once asked me. “I feel like I’m in the playoffs.”
The support wasn’t just something I felt at games. I felt it when I went for a walk or pumped gas or was out to dinner with my family.
“Hey, we just want to let you know we’re rooting for you guys,” they’d say. “Let’s do it!”
The fans at Boston Garden were so engaged that they would be in their seats at least a half-hour before tip-off. They loved to watch us and the other team go through warm-ups. You almost worried that the game, for their sake, would not start soon enough. Then, once it did start, they saw their job as more than rooting for the good guys. They tried to intimidate the bad guys. You are not welcome here, and we will see that you don’t forget it.
I can’t imagine ever hearing a Celtics fan say, “It doesn’t matter if I go to the game or not.” Whether they were sitting up high close to the rafters or courtside, they felt that they, not just the players, had to bring their “A” game night after night. Or they would be letting us down.
And, man, did they know their basketball. Nothing got by them.
Run a questionable play near the end of a game and, believe me, you would hear about it, either on the court or when
people approached you around town. I was our top free-throw shooter, but every so often, to get Paul in rhythm, we agreed he would go to the line when the other team was called for a technical.
“Why isn’t Allen shooting it?” the fans would want to know.
Even how they sounded was different from anything I was familiar with. The noise kept rising, and rising, until everything began to shake and you felt like the whole building might come down.
And to think that Boston, I’d heard for the longest time, was a city where a black athlete might not feel very welcome. I have been to a lot of cities in America, and racism exists everywhere, whether people want to believe it or not. The whites live in a certain part of town, the blacks in another. Boston, I believe, received its reputation due to the difficult times that Bill Russell and other black players faced in the 1950s and 1960s.
The times haven’t changed much. Look what happened in the spring of 2017, when fans at Fenway Park shouted the n-word at Adam Jones, an outfielder for the Baltimore Orioles. The Red Sox have to take whatever steps necessary to make sure incidents like this don’t happen again anywhere.
On opening night, we beat the Washington Wizards, 103–83, Paul leading the way with 28 points. KG, meanwhile, was everywhere: 22 points, 20 rebounds, five assists, three blocks, and three steals. I chipped in with 17, including two three-pointers.
You can’t base anything on a single performance, but it sure felt as if this show was destined to be a hit. Not that we were there to entertain; we were there to work.
Talking trash was also not our style. Gilbert Arenas, the point guard for the Wizards, had bragged how he, Caron Butler, and Antawn Jamison were the better Big Three. We didn’t need to respond, except on the court.
The next game, in a 98–95 victory over the Raptors in Toronto, I scored my first big basket as a Celtic, a three from the corner with 2.6 seconds to go in OT, one of seven threes I hit that night.
For years, prior to KG and I arriving in Boston, the other team at the end of a game would force Paul to beat them. Now, on any given day, the defense could not be certain who would take the last shot: Paul, KG, or me. And if they tried to double any of us, we’d find the open man.
Which reminds me of a conversation the three of us had with a writer in Boston before the season started.
“I have a question I want you guys to answer, all at the same time,” she said. “Who is going to get the ball for the last shot?”
I said, “The open man.” Paul said, “Ray.” KG said, “One of them.”
What struck me was how different the answer would have been the year before, or any year. Each of us would not have hesitated for a second to say, “Me.” Each of us would have been right.
We kept going, winning our next six to reach 8-0, before a 104–102 loss on the road to the Orlando Magic. About a week later, we took on the Cavs in Cleveland.
With 23.1 seconds left in regulation and the game tied at 92, I went to the line for two free throws. No problem. The first one went in . . . and out! What? How could I miss in a moment like this?
Missing the first one, though, was not where I messed up. Thinking about the first one as I was getting ready to shoot the second was.
Still angry with myself, I didn’t focus on my routine, and, as I’m sure you know by now, routine is everything in this sport. In free throws, I’d locate the center nail on the floor with my right foot, mimic my follow-through without the ball, catch the ball from the ref, roll it in my hands, dribble three times, roll it again, and shoot.
Every time. Everywhere. It was my way of distracting myself from any anxiety I might feel.
I missed again.
We ended up losing in overtime, 109–104, LeBron with 38 points and 13 assists. I was upset, as you can imagine, though it hit me there was a real learning opportunity there, and damn if I was going to miss that as well: it does no good to dwell on missing a free throw, or on missing a three-pointer, or on missing a teammate who is wide open. The game moves too rapidly. The mind must move at the same speed or you’ll be left behind. Focus instead on the next free throw. The next three-point shot. The next pass.
There was another lesson I learned that night. Who was I to assume that I couldn’t miss a free throw? I didn’t shoot 100 percent from the line. I shot 90 percent. That means missing one out of every 10, and this just happened to be the one.
Lessons learned, I moved on.
The next day, though, I got a call from my former teammate Sam Cassell, who was playing for the Clippers.
“I wouldn’t have missed those free throws RayAllen, RayAllen,” he said.
Knowing Sam, his call didn’t bother me one bit. He was right: he wouldn’t have missed them.
Two days later, we began a new winning streak, beating the Knicks, 104–59, holding them to 30 percent from the field. They didn’t score more than 18 in any quarter. We then held the Heat to 85, and the Cavs to 70. In the month of December, we lost only once, by two points to the Pistons at the Garden. By early January, we were 29-3, the identical win-loss total the Bulls had in 1996 when they went on to win a then-record 72 games.
Believe me, though, winning was not nearly as automatic as we made it seem. Every game felt like the Super Bowl, every team eager to pull off the upset, and keeping your edge over an 82-game season is next to impossible.
Thank goodness for Doc. He knew how to motivate us, often with a quote from history that he would write on the wall or stick in our locker. On Martin Luther King Day, we spoke about what Dr. King did for each of us to get to where we were. Doc was the first coach I played for where it was not just about basketball; it was about reaching his players as human beings too.
My favorite quote was from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 speech, “The Man in the Arena”:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who . . . at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The choice is yours. You can be like Kenny, the kid who said I wouldn’t make the team in junior high, or my teammate at Hillcrest who told everyone I’d be an alcoholic.
Or you can be the one who dares greatly, in whatever you do with your life. Any time I hear somebody being too critical of an individual in the public eye, I think: At least that person is putting his reputation on the line. When have you, the critic, shown that kind of courage?
A day rarely goes by when I don’t share the “The Man in the Arena” with someone; it means that much to me. I was also inspired by a video Doc showed us in the playoffs one year, called “Battle at Kruger.” The battle is between a group of lions, a herd of buffalo, and a crocodile. Bottom line: If we go our separate ways, we don’t stand a chance. But if we stick together, we can beat anyone.
Earlier, along the same lines, Doc introduced us to Ubuntu, a philosophy practiced by none other than Nelson Mandela.
The point is that, to be the best you can be, everybody around you also has to be the best they can be. Ubuntu became our mantra for the rest of the season. Before going onto the court, we would join together in a circle, raise our arms, and remind ourselves to play for one another, not for any individual glory.
“Ubuntu, be our brothers’ keeper,” we’d shout.
Doc brought in the leader of a basketball organization from South Africa, who told us that, in his community, people constantly reached out to anyone who was in need.
James Posey, who had been in the league since 1999, also had a way to motivate the guys.
All he had to do was show us something the rest of us did not have—his ring. During practice, Doc put the starters on one side of the court, the subs on the other. James,
being one of the subs, kept making the same comment.
“That’s okay, y’all got no rings,” he would say. He won that championship with the Heat in 2006.
He was kidding around, but hearing him say it over and over had a real effect on us. We never lost sight of what we were chasing.
Then, in March, we signed Sam Cassell, who had been waived by the Clippers a week before. Sam, at 38, was well past his prime, but he could still shoot and run an offense, which we sorely needed on the second unit. Sam also would help keep us from getting complacent. Looking back, I can think of at least five games we had given away.
Two weeks later, Sam scored 17 points in a victory over the Spurs in San Antonio. We won the next night in Houston, and in Dallas two nights later. That’s what you call the “Texas Three-Step.” Taking 11 of our final 12, we finished the season at 66-16, securing the number 1 seed in the Eastern Conference and home-court advantage throughout the postseason.
Of course, there was no reason to celebrate yet. Nothing less than a title, and another ride on the Duck Boat, would be acceptable.
Doc made sure we understood what would be required going forward.
“We need to cut out all the extracurricular activities,” he told us, “so you can take care of yourselves. If that means you guys need to stop having sex, or need to have more sex, I don’t care. Whatever it is, I need you to make the sacrifices to be ready for the playoffs.”
I never thought that having more sex was a “sacrifice,” but what did I know?
Atlanta was our opponent in the first round. The Hawks had won only 37 games, 29 fewer than we did. Sweeping them was a real possibility, especially after we took the first two at the Garden, by 23 and 19 points. There was no sense in allowing the series to go on a moment longer than it needed to.
Or you can do what we did: lose the next two in Atlanta and make it a series again. Either these were not the Hawks we saw during the season or we weren’t who we pretended to be.
