Ray Allen will go down as one of the best shooters in the history of basketball, a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame and an all-around good guy (the man is leaving his shoes in rogue locations in Boston for goodness sake).
But is Ray's resume too long for the Celtics to re-sign the 34-year-old after the 2009-10 season?
For his part, Allen isn't letting that question distract him from the team's goal.
“My job doesn’t change," Allen told Boston.com. "I gotta go out and do the same things. We get paid to play basketball. We’re all in a great situation so we can’t look past this year.”
Allen spoke to the Web site while attending the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Friday night.
“Any time you can be around great players, legends, Hall of Famers, it’s a great pleasure,” he said. “I enjoyed this event, watching Michael [Jordan] get inducted and him having David Thompson up on stage and I think about that for myself with Mike because Mike was a guy I always wanted to be like and a lot of us kids wanted to be like. So it was great to see him talk about who pushed him, who did it for him because he was that guy for a lot of us.”
Allen is due $19.7 million this season. Whether or not Allen is the guy for the Celtics after next year is still to be determined, but he seemed confident that he can still bring it this year.
“We’re excited. Being veteran players, we all know what we’re playing for and the feeling we had in ’08. We want to get back to that,” he said. “And Rasheed [Wallace] wants to get back to the feeling when he won a championship as well. So it’s not about individuals, we know we’ve got to come together collectively as a team and try to find the best chemistry to make this thing work so we can be that dominant team like we were in ’08.’"
