“You got alpha males just kind of banging up against each other” – When Ray Allen realized that he had to co-exist with Kevin Garnett to make the Celtics Big Three work originally appeared on Basketball Network.
One of the biggest adjustments that Ray Allen had to make when he joined the Boston Celtics in 2007 was sacrificing his numbers.
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However, aside from that, Allen also had to co-exist with his new teammates, especially his co-stars Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce.
Adjusting to the Ticket and the Truth meant respecting their behaviors and accepting their personalities. That was something that Ray realized he had to do the moment he met Garnett for the first time.
“I remember we played our first game in Rome,” recalled Allen on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “Before the game, I’m in here just dribbling the ball, getting ready; I’m excited this is the first game together. And then he looks over at me and he’s kind of moving to the locker room. He looks over at me he goes, ‘How long you going to be doing that?’ And I was like, ‘Doing what?’ And I’m just sitting there dribbling between my legs. He’s like, ‘You going to be dribbling the whole time?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’re about to play a basketball game this is what you do,” Allen surprisingly answered.
First glimpse at the new-look Celtics
The game that Ray is referring to was the Boston Celtics’ preseason game against the Toronto Raptors at PalaLottomatica in Rome, Italy on October 6, 2007. It was the highly-anticipated debut of a new-look Celtics team that had nine new players under contract.
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Garnett was Boston’s biggest addition that summer. The Big Ticket was the 2004 NBA MVP and was an All-Star, All-NBA, and All-Defensive selection the year before he joined the Celtics. He wanted to team up with good buddy Pierce with the hopes of winning a championship in Beantown. However, Garnett did not join the Celtics until they acquired Allen because he felt they needed one more star to make it happen.
Allen was the main man for the Seattle SuperSonics and was an All-Star player before he wore green. That first encounter with Garnett in Rome immediately made him realize that this was no longer Seattle and that he had to share the limelight with his co-stars.
“That was the moment where you got alpha males just kind of banging up against each other because the previous year, he was in a locker room where he was the guy and I was in a locker room where I was the guy, and everything kind of marched to the beat of our drums. And so now we had to learn to share space with individuals like ourselves, and it was an eye-opener, but it taught me how to say, ‘Okay, in order for this to work, we have to share space, and we got to understand like, this is not just my show anymore,'” added Allen.
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Winning the first NBA title in the post-Larry Bird era
With the Big Three, the Celtics produced the biggest single-season turnaround in the history of the NBA. After winning a mere 24 games in 2006-07, Boston posted a league-best 66-16 record with Paul, KG, and Ray leading the way. The incredible turnaround earned Danny Ainge the NBA Executive of the Year award, and rightfully so. But that wasn’t it.
Garnett was named the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year and the Celtics had the best defensive rating in the league that season. As the top seed in the playoffs, Boston knocked out the Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference bracket before defeating Kobe Bryant’s Los Lakers 4-2 in the 2008 NBA Finals to win Boston’s first championship in the post-Bird era.
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Pierce, Garnett, and Allen all saw their averages plummet while playing together. But more than the sacrifice in statistics, each had to leave their egos at the doorstep to make their championship dreams a reality. They did that, and that’s why they’re not ringless today.
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jun 11, 2025, where it first appeared.