MVN - Most Valuable Network

Regarding Ray Allen: Some Folks Know Better

When Dan Shaugnessy takes on a subject, you know the sky is falling. Poor Ray Allen. He’s not pistol whipping the competition with his vaunted jump shot, and there is Shaugnessy right there with so many other sports analysts putting pressure on the Celtics shooting guard. The Celtics win Game 1 against Detroit, and the story line that Shaughnessy comes up with is how Ray Allen is spinning his wheels, and is stuck in neutral.

Moreover, I didn’t think that the talking heads at ESPN or even CSN would ever let go of the fact that Ray was cornered with probably the 100th question on why his shots weren’t falling during the Cleveland series. As Tom Halzack said, Ray has become a big side story at the games, “Everyone is lining up their lawn chairs at court side and waiting for Ray’s close encounter of the 3rd point kind.”

You know the fateful Ray Allen quote - he put it on Rondo and others to get him the ball in the right spot, and then everything would work itself out. But he failed to mention that he has repeatedly deferred to his team mates, and has also been more closely guarded and probably double-teamed (trapped) than any Celtic during these playoffs out of respect for his shooting abilities. He’s even been taking less shots than Rondo on a per minute basis. He’s in the flow and isn’t trying to be a volume shooter out there - that’s for damn sure.

For the playoffs, he’s got the second highest +/- stat on the Celtics behind Kevin Garnett, despite his supposedly overall putrid play. The focus on Ray Allen’s shooting slump is quite incredible really, especially when he has embraced the team concept of winning over individual scoring all season long.

Ray Allen has a body of work in his years in the NBA that rivals the best shooters - go to databasebasketball.com, and you will see that Ray Allen is 7th in 3 pt% for players who averaged 14 or more points per game (ppg), for those averaging more than 20 ppg, he is first in 3 pt%. He is second to Reggie Miller in career 3 point shots made. His free throw shooting is impeccable and he’s in fact leading the playoffs in free throw percentage.

Typical of boorish writers like Dan Shaughnesssy, the expectations heaped on athletes in Boston are oh so high. Ray Allen has been knocked for not shooting up to the expectations laid out for him here in Boston, but in reality he shot his career average for threes (39.7%) and field goals (44.6%), and was 2 pct point higher than his career average in free throws (90.7%), while making the all-star team again as a 3rd wheel. Those sort of accomplishments should be called “meeting expectations”, but in the world of Boston journalism, you can’t afford a slump of any proportion, especially in the playoffs, unless you don’t mind being in the headlines.

So where somebody like Shaugnessy feels he has to trash Ray Allen when he’s helping the team win, just to get his front page article published, he should be looking at the facts, and talk to Ray’s team mates and his opponents (see Golen’s AP article):

Doc Rivers:

“I’m not worried about it. I’m really not,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. “We’re winning games, and Ray’s making plays.”

Team mates (Garnett):

none of the Celtics would express a concern about Allen’s slump— “if you want to call it that,” Garnett said. . . . “Ray’s a part of the Boston Celtics, and the Boston Celtics are winning,” Garnett said, dismissing the idea that Allen needed emotional support. “I’m sure it’s not his first shooting slump, and it’s definitely not his last. “So I don’t have any sympathy for Ray Allen. I think he’s playing great basketball.”

Coach Saunders:

“Ray is a good shooter and he’s going to shoot the ball, no matter what,” Pistons coach Flip Saunders said. “I don’t treat him what he’s done over the week; I treat him what he’s done over his career.”

Richard Hamilton:

Detroit guard Richard Hamilton wouldn’t even wait for the end of the question before shaking his head, emphatically, “No.”

“You can never think that he’s going to keep missing,” he said before Detroit practiced at Emerson College’s downtown gym on Wednesday. “If you start leaving him open, he can get hot.”

So forget about “overcoming Allen’s lackluster performance” as a way to characterize the Celtics win over Pistons, and forget about over-analyzing the situation and coming up with excuses like he’s too old (age 32), his legs are shot, the double ankle surgeries finally caught up with him, playoff pressure is getting to him, and the best one of course is that his family issues are affecting his game (a convoluted murder plot involving Allen’s father-in-law). That’s just being sensational and making a buck at Ray’s expense.

A shooting slump is a shooting slump, and if Ray is going to put it behind him, all he has to do is rest his legs a bit, bet focused and watch this instructional video and he’ll be fine:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Celtics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.