October 29, 2012 was an unforgettable day for Boston Celtics fans. Although watching the C’s in action is always special to us, this was a day marred by mixed emotions. The uncomfortable experience of witnessing Ray Allen wear a Miami Heat jersey for the first time left a sour taste in every diehard Celtic fan’s mouth.
Boston’s basketball culture is defined by the sense of unity between the players, their individual sacrifices in order to achieve common goals, and their love, respect, and passion towards the game. For Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, and coach Doc Rivers, basketball is the most important thing in the world. You won’t see them on the covers of fashion magazines or in too many TV commercials.
The same cannot be said about LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. These men love the limelight and use the power of publicity to promote themselves in every conceivable way. Their actions sometimes give the impression that they see basketball as merely a means to an end – becoming celebrities. In the words of Joakim Noah, they’re “Hollywood as hell”.
When Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett got traded to the Celtics in 2007, they admitted that they had a long way to go before they could win the championship that had eluded them throughout their careers. During interviews, they could barely contain their excitement when they said that they were anxious to practice together in order to grow as a team and achieve their goal. Their humility payed off; despite never making any guarantees, they won the title in their first year alongside Pierce, Rondo, and Rivers.
This is the complete opposite to what happened in the summer of 2010 when LeBron James and Chris Bosh signed with the Heat. The city of Miami welcomed them to the team in an extravagant ceremony with flashy pyrotechnics. The most infamous moment of the celebration was when James declared that the Heat would win “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven” championships. The so-called “King” James did not live up to his boasts and the Heat fell to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals.
When you compare these words (and this result) to Garnett’s and Allen’s, the difference between the two teams becomes abundantly clear: The Celtics represent humbleness and devotion to the game, and the Heat represent arrogance and entitlement.
As if the contrasting personalities of the opposing stars weren’t enough, the Heat had just defeated the Celtics in a grueling seven-game series a month before Allen switched sides. It is one thing to go to another team after having created near-fraternal bonds with your teammates (not to mention a love for the city of Boston that he claims to still possess), but it’s something else completely to join the team that shattered your dream of winning a second championship. This is perhaps the biggest reason why it hurts so much to see Ray leave. If he had gone to a Western Conference team it might not have been as difficult to swallow, but going to the conference rival who ended our (and his!) season is cringe worthy.
To put the situation into perspective, let’s compare Allen’s case to James Posey’s in 2008. A month after winning the championship with the C’s, Posey signed a 25 million dollar contract with the New Orleans Hornets. Plenty of fans gave him a hard time, but he never would have made that much money if he stayed in Boston. Ray Allen’s decision is even more baffling when you realize that the Celtics offered him 12 million dollars for two years, twice the amount that the Heat are paying him now.
When you add all this to the fact that Allen and Garnett joined the team at the same time, with the same goal, and with the same vision of what it would be to play together; his exit becomes an epic act of treason. Although Garnett has tried to avoid talking about all this to the media, his actions show that he feels betrayed by his former teammate. First, he said that he “lost” Allen’s number, and then he refused to shake hands with him during yesterday’s game. Paul Pierce and Doc Rivers, while saying that they “wish him the best”, also admitted that Allen’s decision hurt them on a personal level.
Fans of the now-deceased “Big 3” feel as if we had a girlfriend who was with us for five years and then said that she was leaving us for a guy who killed our grandmother the day before. We went through so many highs and lows with Allen – the first championship, being up by 13 points in the seventh game of the 2010 Finals and losing at the last moment, watching Ray become the all-time leading 3-point shooter in NBA history, losing to Miami in five games in 2011, and coming within one game of the Finals last season. I understand that it’s his right to play wherever he wants, but going to the team that has given us (and him, too) our saddest moments as fans makes us feel like we’ve been mercilessly stabbed in the back.
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