Bob Weiss, one of our assistant coaches, took over for Nate. His calm approach was good for our younger players.
The last thing you ever want is your coaches to always be yelling at you. Believe me, when you screw up, you’re the first to know. That’s why I stopped looking over at the bench after I threw a bad pass or my man scored a bucket. Coach, if you’re not helping me, you’re hurting me.
As the 2005–06 season wore on, however, and our mistakes piled up, Bob was too calm. Whenever we lost a game, he would say softly, “That’s okay, guys, we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
That’s fine every so often, but most times we needed a kick in the ass. Only that wasn’t Bob’s personality. That was George’s, which is why you search for a coach who can be soothing and severe. Doc Rivers was like that. So was Jim Calhoun.
Meanwhile, ownership wasn’t willing to wait for tomorrow.
In early January, after just 30 games—we were 13-17—they let Bob go. And I thought Chris, who was fired after two seasons, hadn’t been given enough time, though I got the feeling Bob was ready to go, that he believed he’d done everything he could.
Either way, I blamed myself. Whenever a coach is fired, it’s on the players. If we do our job, he keeps his. As with Chris, I never got a chance to say good-bye to Bob. That’s the way it goes in the NBA: they fire you, and you are out of town before sunset.
The team was in Chicago when Bob Hill, an assistant coach, replaced Weiss and addressed us for the first time. Dressed us down was more like it, motherfucker this, motherfucker that. You’d think we had gone 0 for 30 by how disgusted Bob was. “We have a shootaround tomorrow,” he said, “and it is going to be one of the hardest shootarounds you’ve ever had.”
I felt as if I were back in freshman year at UConn, going through drill after drill. We never practiced that hard during a shootaround under Coach Weiss, or Nate for that matter. Mind you, I’m not complaining. We needed the work.
Bob was tough on me on occasion, but he didn’t yell like Chris did. He would often go out of his way to praise me. I would be driving home after a game, and Bob would give me a call.
“Listen, man, I just want to let you know how awesome you were tonight,” he’d say.
That meant a lot to me. I can’t think of another coach I played for who showed that much respect.
Too bad we didn’t reward his efforts with more victories. In the end, it still comes down to talent in this league, and we did not have enough—or to put it more kindly, the talent we did have was raw. Our two young bigs, Johan Petro from France and Robert Swift from Bakersfield, California, who we drafted out of high school in 2004, needed a veteran such as Jerome James to help them develop—the same Jerome James who was then with the Knicks.
The losses mounted, and we finished 35-47, the worst record for a team I was on since my rookie season in Milwaukee. The series against the Spurs seemed like a lifetime ago.
I would be lying if I said that losing didn’t bother me, but it didn’t bother me as much as you might imagine. I enjoyed the guys I was playing with immensely and felt strongly that, if we continued to dedicate ourselves, we could get back to where we were in 2005. Young and impressionable, they didn’t have too high of an opinion of themselves, and that would be to their benefit.
Bob used to tell me all the time: “I don’t know how you do it. You come out and play hard every single night, and do your best despite us not having a real chance to win.”
Honestly, I never thought of it like that. Winning is not just about scoring more points than the other team; it’s also about giving the game everything you have, regardless of who you play against or how talented your teammates may be. I learned long ago to focus on what you can control, not on what you can’t.
Out of my control, for example, was the future of the franchise in Seattle.
In July 2006, Howard sold the Sonics to a group from Oklahoma City, where the team, renamed the Thunder, would play starting in 2008. I’d always believed the Sonics would never leave Seattle, given such enthusiastic support from the fans at KeyArena. Turns out, those fans represented a relatively small sample size; perhaps the organization hadn’t done nearly enough to establish a bond throughout the community.
Also out of my control was the condition of my ankles, even though there was no one to blame but myself. Instead of worrying about what George said about me to the press, I should have sat out a few games, perhaps more, back in 2001 or 2002. Since I hadn’t, the scar tissue in my ankles had built up, and the pain had grown almost unbearable. In April 2007, with the team once again headed for the NBA lottery, I underwent surgery to remove bone spurs in both ankles, missing the final 16 games.
While I recovered, I looked forward to the upcoming season, especially after I had lunch downtown in June with our new general manager, Sam Presti.
Sam wanted to know everything about the team, and I was glad to fill him in, as I’d done with Senator Kohl. I was confident that Sam would make the right moves, starting with the upcoming draft. The ping-pong balls bouncing in our favor, for a change, we would have the number 2 pick, which meant, barring a late surprise, we would choose Kevin Durant, a can’t-miss forward from the University of Texas. Things finally were looking up.
I was at home with Shannon, Tierra, Rayray, and the most recent addition to the family, Walker, born the year before, when Commissioner Stern made it official: Durant it was. Hallelujah! With KD, Rashard, and myself, we would have an offense capable of competing in the run-and-gun Western Conference.
There was only one problem: it was no longer we; it was they.
On the same night—what was it with me and draft nights?—the Sonics traded me to Boston for Delonte West, Wally Szczerbiak, and the rights to the Celtics’ number 5 pick, Jeff Green, a forward from Georgetown. Just like that, I was on the move again.
So what? If anything, I should have been overjoyed, right? After all, this was not some run-of-the mill franchise they were sending me to. This was the Boston Celtics, as close as it comes to royalty in the NBA. Plus, I would be only an hour from family and friends in Connecticut.
Why, then, did I have such mixed feelings?
Well, for one thing, I was upset with how the trade went down. Once again, I got the news from the media instead of the team.
I also felt that Sam had led me to believe at our lunch that I was an important part of his plans for the future.
What a performance. He should have been in Hollywood, not Seattle. If only he had told me, “Ray, we have this deal on the table. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I just wanted you to know about it so you can be prepared.” I would have thanked him for the respect he was showing me and wished him luck. I wasn’t some rookie. I knew basketball was a business.
Besides, whenever you’re traded, there’s more to consider than what team you’ll be playing for. Shannon and I had a circle of friends we’d have to leave behind. I felt like I did when I was growing up. The difference now was that I was the one getting new orders, not my father.
Leaving Seattle felt the same as leaving Milwaukee. I didn’t do what I’d set out to do, and that was to win a championship. In both cases, decisions were made that didn’t bring us closer to reaching that goal, and the window to win—so narrow to begin with in this league—had closed. For good.
Yet, once again, the disappointment didn’t last long. We were soon on a plane to Boston.
To a city, and a time, my family and I would cherish forever.
Walking into the Boston Garden and seeing the numbers worn by Bird, McHale, Parish, Havlicek, Russell, Cousy, and other heroes from the past made it sink in: I’m really a Celtic!
I thought it might happen before, on draft night in 1996, when I got the call from Red Auerbach, but it wasn’t meant to be. Not yet.
From the start, Danny Ainge, the Celtics’ GM, could not have made me feel more welcome. Danny explained that acquiring me was just the first move. He was constantly looking for ways to improve the team, calling me to ask my opinion of one person or another. I can’t think of any other general manager who would seek that much input from a player when he was trying to put his team together.
Danny’s next move was to bring in someone I knew very well—someone who, like me, was looking for that first ring and starting to run out of time. This player and I met when we were kids in South Carolina, sharing a ride to Columbia and eager to find out how we might stack up against the best players in the state, talking about Michael Jordan, the girls we knew, and the other things boys with big dreams back then liked to talk about.
Yup, Kevin Garnett.
All these years later, Kevin and I still had a great amount of respect for each other, although we didn’t cross paths too often. I got the feeling that because he came in a year before I did—he was drafted out of high school by Minnesota—it was important for him to make it clear to me that he was the veteran and I was the newcomer. He used to tell people I made him run errands when we were kids, such as picking up Gatorade at the corner store. Which wasn’t true.
“We couldn’t afford to buy Gatorades in those days,” I told Kevin.
Shortly after I joined the Celtics, he called me. The trade talks between Boston and Minnesota were heating up, and Kevin had some genuine concerns. Playing in Boston wouldn’t be the same as playing in Minnesota. He’d yearned to be on a bigger stage, and now would have to come through.
“Man, I don’t know how this is going to work,” he said. “I got to really step up my game.”
There was absolutely nothing wrong with Kevin’s game—during the 2006–07 season, he averaged 22.4 points and a league-high 12.8 rebounds—but NBA players are not robots. We too have doubts from time to time.
“You just do what you do, and everything will be fine,” I assured him.
Soon it became official: Kevin was coming to Boston, thanks to a deal Danny swung with his ex–Celtics teammate from the 1980s, Kevin McHale, the vice president of the Timberwolves.
With Kevin and Paul Pierce, the Celtics’ longtime star, I was now part of a new Big Three, more potent than the Big Three in Milwaukee. The fans were excited and sensed an opportunity for their team’s 17th banner, the first in more than 20 years. Far be it from me to lower anyone’s expectations, but I wasn’t ready to book the parade down Boylston Street just yet. I knew from experience that too much can go wrong, and fast.
Perhaps there is no better example than the 2003–04 Los Angeles Lakers. That season, to a team that already had Shaq and Kobe, they added future Hall of Famers Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Seriously, how could a team so gifted not win a championship? That’s easy. In the Finals, they came up against a very formidable Detroit squad coached by Larry Brown. The result: Pistons in five.
Kevin, you see, was on to something—how was this going to work?—and it had to do with how he, Paul, and I would fit into our new roles. Three egos, one ball. Do the math.
There was only one solution.
“This is Paul’s team,” Kevin and I told our coach, Doc Rivers, right away. “We’re here to help the team out however best we can. He’s the captain, and we’re not trying to step on his toes.”
As for the relationship between Kevin and I, that was another matter entirely. We were not teenagers anymore; we were men, with much different habits and personalities. As we found out in Rome, where the team went in early October to play a few preseason games. My doctor suggested I hold off for a little longer, as I was still recovering from ankle surgery, but I couldn’t wait to work out with my new teammates and see how I fit in.
Not very well. Not with Kevin.
It started innocently enough, me dribbling the basketball in front of my locker before we went on the court for our first game. I’d been dribbling before games for as long as I could remember. Not once did anybody voice an objection. Until then.
“How long are you going to be doing that?” Kevin asked.
“Doing what?” I responded.
“Dribbling the basketball. Are you going to be doing that the whole time?”
“Yes, this is what I do to get ready. We’re about to play a basketball game.”
Neither of us was willing to give an inch. That’s what happens when you have two alpha dogs in the same room, each determined to impose his will on the other. As franchise players, we were used to having our way.
“No, you’re not going to do that,” he said.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” I told him. “You do what you do, and I do what I do.”
Gee, can two grown men be any more juvenile? The rest of the guys, meanwhile, did not say a word, although no doubt they were thinking to themselves: This isn’t good. They were curious to see which alpha dog would be the first to back down.
Me, as it turned out. I realized you have to give in every so often for the good of the team, although I now had a feeling this season was going to challenge us all.
From then on, I stuck to my routine as much as possible while trying to respect how others prepared for games. In the few minutes before a game started, I had to really watch myself. I would be in the huddle, getting instructions from Doc, and as soon as we put our hands in to say, “Celtics on three,” Kevin would thrust his arm into the air and give me a bump if I was too close, or anyone else was. The message was impossible to miss:
Get out of my way! This is my space!
And God forbid you’re on the opposing team and say something that gets under his skin.
Like what happened one night in the 2007–08 season against the Bulls. After Kevin hit one of his trademark step-back jumpers, Joakim Noah, their rookie center, told him, “Hey, big fella, that was a nice move. You’ve got to teach me that.”
There was nothing wrong with what Noah said. Players, especially those new to the league, always hope to pick up tips they can adopt for their own games. Noah looked up to Kevin. Only Kevin was not about to teach him a damn thing—except to know better than to ever speak to him again.
“Get off my dick,” he told Noah.
I couldn’t help but laugh. That was KG for you. If you’re on his team, he will die for you. If you’re not, he won’t give you the time of day.
Which is why, of the dozens of teammates I ever had, in college or the NBA, if I had to choose only one to play with, it would be Kevin Garnett. No one else comes close.
Not because he lit up the stat sheet with points, rebounds, blocks, assists, steals, you name it, and not because he could play three or four positions. But because he never took a game off. A possession off. I can’t say that of anyone else I played with, and I played with some of the best.
Though I have to tell you, I was just as intense as he was. The only difference was, I didn’t go out of my way to show it, and why should I have to? You don’t have to bump someone, or scream, or have a permanent scowl on your face to prove how intense you are. You prove it by being dedicated to your craft, night in and night out. So what if others don’t see that intensity? You know it’s there, and that’s what matters.
Looking back, given the problems that would later surface between us, there are things KG and I should have said to each other from the start, and it wasn’t as if we didn’t have our chances.
One night, before the trip to Rome, we met for dinner at a steakhouse in Boston. We talked about how much it hurt to be on losing teams for a large part of our careers and how much we wanted to earn a ring. What I wish we had talked about was something deeper, more personal. That he and I would support each other no matter what issues were to come between us.
Let’s never forget we’re brothers and that we go back a long way, I would have told him.
Instead, on the very same night, KG found something else to compete with me over.
“I’ll take the check,” I told the waitress.
“No,” he said, “I tip way better than him, so you better give me the check.”
There was no point in arguing with the guy. What struck me was that he felt the need to be seen as being superior to me, even in something as petty as this. The two of us had never been out to dinner. So how did he know what kind of tipper I was?
Perhaps if we’d said the things I wish we said, we could have had a good laugh—look, we’re competing already!—and decided to split the bill. Then, when we had bigger conflicts later on, such as the dribbling incident, perhaps we could have resolved them as well.
One thing we had in common, however, was our willingness to sacrifice. For me, that meant I’d no longer be counted on to score at least 20 points a game, as I did in every season from 1999 through 2007. No problem. What exactly did those points get me, anyway? Not a trip to the Finals, I’ll tell you that.
Still, not being the number-one option would take some getting used to. In Seattle, I averaged roughly 19 shots per game. By comparison, during my first five starts with Boston, I averaged about 13. So, instead of taking almost any shot to work myself into a good shooting rhythm, I had to be more selective, waiting for the best first shot that was available; my goal, you see, was always to shoot at least 50 percent. That’s how efficient Michael Jordan was. People say Michael took a lot of shots, and he did, but he averaged almost 50 percent over his whole career—49.7 percent, to be exact.
If anything, I might have been too unselfish. It wasn’t that way at first. Any time I had a decent look at a three, I let it go. Except Doc would then get in my face during the next time-out.
“You see Kevin Garnett in the block,” he said, “you throw him the ball.”
Nothing against KG—he was almost automatic in the lane—but to that point in my career, in similar situations, the coaches had always urged me to take the shot. Which I did, and it made no difference who was in the block. Some years, I hit over 40 percent of my threes. Besides, if I had thrown the ball to KG he would have given it right back and come out to set a screen for me. There were times we had to tell him to shoot more.
As the season wore on and he saw how hard I worked to prepare myself for each game, Doc became more comfortable with me taking the shot and actually encouraged it. The three became a weapon for us.
“You guys have the best shooter in the NBA on your team,” Doc told the others. “Get him the ball. I never mind if Ray Allen takes the shot.”
Yet I still didn’t get enough touches, which frustrated me the most when I was going through a rough stretch. Usually, in those situations, the coach calls a play to get the guy a good look. See the ball fall through the net just once, and it’s amazing how quickly your confidence will return. Doc called plays constantly for Paul Pierce.
“We got to get Paul going,” he’d tell us.
I wish, every once in a while, he would have said, “We got to get Ray going.” I was someone, after all, they counted on to hit a three or make the free throws to put the other team away.
“Mariano, we need you,” my teammates would say, referring to the New York Yankees’ star closer Mariano Rivera. “Go in there and make a shot.”
I was ready to do just that, but it would’ve been much easier if I had been able to warm up, as Rivera did, instead of going through long periods without touching the ball. In Seattle, I rarely missed a free throw during the fourth quarter. Having had the ball in my hands on most of the possessions down the stretch, I stayed in rhythm.
In retrospect, I should have talked to Doc much sooner about those concerns, just as I waited too long to talk to George. No one is going to speak up for you if you don’t speak up for yourself. My hesitation shows how much winning a championship meant to me. I was not going to be blamed for disrupting the harmony we worked hard to build.
Likewise, I was careful in how I dealt with Paul.
Paul and I had less in common than KG and me, especially when it came to how we approached the game. He was focused when he was matched up against LeBron or Kevin Durant or any of the other top players, but not necessarily if the man he was guarding wasn’t among the elite.
“I’m taking the night off,” he’d tell us.
Paul was obviously joking, but the fact he even said it bothered me. Because you never knew if that mind-set might affect his performance and cost us the game. We were fighting hard for home-court advantage for the whole playoffs, and one game might make the difference.
Once, he tried to get me to think along the same lines.
“Hey, Ray, you got a night off,” he said after noticing that the player I would be defending wasn’t highly regarded.
“No, I don’t,” I told him emphatically. He didn’t say another word.
No player should ever have a night off. The worst player in the NBA would not be in the NBA if he weren’t good, which means he has the potential to beat you on any given night. And if you think you have to put forth a greater effort against the top players, you clearly aren’t giving enough of an effort against everyone else.
As the year unfolded, I was glad to see the effect KG and I had on Paul. Watching us get our shots up and hit the weight room, day after day, he became more serious in the way he prepared. He no longer joked about taking nights off. Come the fourth quarter, if we needed a hoop, Paul was who Doc relied on most, with good reason. No one delivered in the clutch like him.
Our point guard was Rajon Rondo, and I couldn’t have gotten along with him any better. He became like a little brother to me, spending hours at my house asking about contracts and other parts of the business. I was his mentor, a role I was eager to take on. I understood that the more success Rondo had, the more success we’d have as a team.
He wasn’t the greatest shooter in the world, but that didn’t stop him from having a major impact. Rondo was a special player in how he could spot the open man for an easy basket and slide into the paint to snatch rebounds away from guys three or four inches taller. In his second season, there was no limit to how good this kid could be.
Rondo was confident, that’s for sure. Perhaps too confident. In doing some research on him—I found it helpful to learn as much as I could about new teammates—I came upon an interview where he was asked if he was excited to be on the same team with Paul, KG, and myself. Rondo’s response was something to the effect of: they are going to have to get used to playing with me.
Wow. In hindsight, it was probably something I should’ve paid more attention to, given how our relationship would fall apart, but at the time I thought it showed the kind of moxie you want to see in a young player, especially the point guard, who sets the tone.
Our center was Kendrick Perkins. Perk wasn’t afraid to mix it up with anyone. Let your man get by you, he would be there in the paint to bail you out, as was KG.
Then there was our bench, and I’d stack it up against any bench in the league: we had guys who could score, like Eddie House, and guys who could stop the other team from scoring, like James Posey and Tony Allen. When I watched James guard his man, being a hound in front of the ball, it hit me for the first time how much of a skill playing defense truly is.
For many years, I was so good offensively that none of my coaches took me to task on the other side of the ball. I wish they had. The one major regret of my career is that I wasn’t better on the defensive end. I always thought I was putting forth the effort, but I didn’t grasp what it took, like where my body position needed to be at all times. I could slide my feet and cut off the angles, but I didn’t know what to do with my arms and upper body.
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.