Ray Allen's 2014-16 Farewell Tour could have included stops in Houston, Milwaukee
The fallout from grand tour of “We Almost Had Ray Allen” will continue for years. In spite of his relative buoyancy over the last decade of his Hall of Fame career – Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston and Miami all got to dip their beaks – the last few years before his official retirement will forever be marked by his role as The Guy That Could Have Put Us Over the Top.
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Allen hasn’t played a game of NBA basketball since June of 2014, when his Miami Heat fell to the San Antonio Spurs in the Finals. That shot to the bow resulted in LeBron James leaving the Heat for Cleveland, Dwyane Wade signing a curious short-term deal with Miami, and Chris Bosh inking a massive max extension that was fraught with peril then for basketball reasons, and embattled now for, sadly, health reasons.
Ray Allen? The NBA’s most prolific three-point shooter, working in league starved for spacing, kept the suitors at arm’s length. For three tempting offseasons, and with millions of dollars at stake.
He even, according to a discussion with USA Today’s Jeff Zillgitt, turned down a chance to join James Harden, Dwight Howard, and a Houston Rockets team that seemed set for great things:
“One of the biggest factors was for me not to go back was the simple fact that I won twice already. I believed going into the 14-15 season, if I hadn’t won a championship, then I would’ve been on somebody’s roster. I would’ve moved. I would’ve tried to make it work anyway possible.”
Houston made an enticing offer in 2014, Allen said. But the deal – the full mid-level exception according to a person familiar with the situation – wasn’t enough to lure him into another season.
This isn’t some minimum-sized commitment. A mid-level exception, for around the league’s average salary in 2014-15, wouldn’t be akin to Allen following LeBron James to Cleveland, or settling in with Doc Rivers in Los Angeles for a relatively skinflint veteran’s minimum deal. That’s a healthy salary to provide spacing and work as he saw fit (minutes breaks, a bench role, nights off, life under a player’s coach in Kevin McHale) for a team that won 54 games the season before.
That Houston squad, by a wide margin, led the NBA in three-point attempts and makes, but they finished 16th in three-point percentage. Presumably Ray Allen, though he dropped to a sub-standard (for him) 37.5 percent from behind the arc in 2013-14, would have helped raise the bar a bit.
The Rockets went on to enjoy a fine season without Allen, winning 56 games and making it to the Western finals before bowing out in the third round. The team once again replicated its role in taking and making more long-range numbers than anyone else in the league, but the squad’s rank in percentage only ticked up to 14th in the league during 2015-16.
The summer of 2014 was marked with two turn-downs from 2013-14 Heat servicemen, as Chris Bosh famously turned down a chance to pair with Howard and Harden and the offer of Houston’s max cap space (a Bosh signing wouldn’t have affected any offer to Allen). To clear room for the Bosh pursuit, the Heat gave up a draft pick and the rights to effective hybrid guard Jeremy Lin in a deal with the Lakers, and it lost swingman Chandler Parsons to the Mavericks on the same sort of poison-pen deal Houston used to pilfer Lin (from New York) and Omer Asik (from Chicago) two offseasons prior.
Without Allen and Bosh in the bush, Houston made a deal to acquire Trevor Ariza; always a sound move. Still, despite the 56 wins and three rounds of postseason fun, the team was looked at side-eyed by the rest of the league as it needed a (Ray Allen-less) Los Angeles Clippers meltdown to make the Western finals before falling to the Golden State Warriors in a bid to attempt a chance at taking on the (Ray Allen-less) Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2015 NBA Finals.
According to Allen, the last team to make a move for his services in 2016 was the Milwaukee Bucks, a team so desperate (even before the devastating injury to Khris Middleton) for outside shooting that it dealt for Tony Snell prior to 2016-17.
From a talk with Dan Patrick, at his eponymous radio show:
In the interview, Allen mentions watching former NBA scoring stud Ricky Pierce work his way around the margins with Milwaukee in 1997-98, Ray’s second NBA season. Pierce, who made the All-Star team in 1991 with a 20.5-point per game scoring average (despite starting just two games, and averaging fewer than 28 minutes a night; wowser) was 38-years old when he was brought in by the Bucks to help guide a Milwaukee team desperate for veteran leadership to the postseason for the first time since Pierce’s All-Star season with the team in 1991.
Despite the addition of sage point man Terrell Brandon just before the season’s start, a Bucks team featuring Allen and Glenn Robinson fell short of the playoffs with a 36-win season, and Pierce averaged just 3.9 points per game in 39 games.
His work ethic, however, rubbed off on the second-year star from Connecticut. From the interview with Dan Patrick:
“He was one of the great Milwaukee Bucks of all time, and as his career came full circle he ended up back in Milwaukee. I kept thinking, ‘wow, you went all these places and you ended up right back in Milwaukee.’
“And he didn’t play. He was on the roster, and I just remember him working so hard. Out there working on his game. And he was always shooting. And he didn’t play a whole lot.
“And I took that in consideration, like, I’m older than he was then. He was 38, then. I was saying to myself, ‘it would be great to come to a team and really provide an anchor for them. But, am I going to be Ricky Pierce and how he was back in [1997]?’
“Sitting on the bench and working really hard just to stay above board amongst the young people. To help them get better. That was the unknown, and it was going to involve me moving my family from where they are now.”
In the talk with Jeff Zillgitt, Allen discusses how the championship rings he earned (in 2008 with Boston and 2013 with Miami) helped push him away from life as a basketball mercenary. In the must-read feature, he talks up his sustained healthy lifestyle and his interest in watching his children grow up, as Allen and his wife preside over their new business opportunities at home in Florida.
Nothing against Milwaukee, nothing against Houston, but the thirst changes once you have two rings sitting in the safety deposit box.
Still, for those two seasons between his final game and official retirement, it was fun to consider Ray Allen and the idea that his record-setting and award-winning touch from long range could come off the bench for all manner of championship hopefuls. Even your team.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
