On the eve of the enshrinement ceremony for the Class of 2018 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Ray Allen stopped by ESPN’s The Jump and touched on his tumultuous relationship with the 2008 Boston Celtics team. Earlier this week, Allen suggested that he wouldn’t get a congratulatory message from anyone on that Celtics roster from a decade ago. However, despite all the ill will that the players seem to share towards one another, Allen wanted to make it clear that the five seasons he spent in Boston were “the most important time in my life.”
“People look at how I left, but I look at how I lived while I was [in Boston]," Allen said. “That to me is the most important time in my life because I had never won. And I was able to win. And that's probably the most important thing that I want people to remember, is the time that we spent together."
Earlier this year, excerpts from Allen’s new book From the Outside: My Journey Through Life and the Game I Love surfaced, and turned the situation with his former teammates from bad to worse. There were passages that claimed Paul Pierce would take games off while another broke down how a trade that would ship Rajon Rondo to New Orleans fell apart because then-Celtics head coach Doc Rivers didn’t want to burden his friend and former assistant Monty Williams with having to deal with Rondo.
Check out the ESPN interview with Ray Allen above.
