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Ray Allen and the Art of Letting Go

Ray Allen was one of the greatest scorers of his era, and then became a champion by refining his game down to its essence. It makes sense he'd leave at the right time.
Photo by By Paul Keleher via Wikimedia Commons

"I thought he'd been retired," Rajon Rondo said when asked about Ray Allen's retirement on Tuesday. You can take issue with Rondo's tact, here and always, but it was also a reasonable response for Rondo or anyone else to have when hearing the news on Tuesday. Allen hasn't played a NBA game since June 15, 2014, when he hobbled to a one-for-eight performance in the fifth and final game of the Miami Heat's loss to the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals. Later that summer, LeBron James left Miami and re-signed with the Cleveland Cavaliers. There were rumors that Allen would follow him there—or Chris Broussard seemed very confident about it, anyway—but instead Allen wound up sitting out the first part of the season and reassessing whether and where he would want to play. Then he took the second half to continue that assessing. Allen did not play last season, at age 40; you did not have to be Rajon Rondo to assume that the assessment had well and truly been made at that point.

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But if Allen's announcement was more confirmation than anything else, it was still worth making. Most players don't get to announce their retirements; time and attrition do the work for them, and so the end just becomes self-evident. Allen turned 41 over the summer, but the reason he had to announce his retirement is that it was by no means clear—still is, really, even a week into the third NBA season to begin since his last one ended—that he couldn't play another year or two. Maybe not as the same player he was during the first act of his career, when he was one of the league's most easeful and effective scorers, and maybe not even as Allen did during the differently graceful second act, when he coolly pared his game down to fit into multiple-star constellations, first in Boston and then in Miami. But right up until the moment that he made clear he was no longer interested, it seemed foolish to assume that Allen could not play in some other guise, or contribute in some other way, if he wanted to do so.

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Because of how beautifully he managed his decline, it's easy to forget how brilliant Allen was at his peak. The shooting stroke was the shooting stroke, from the first moments of his career to the last, and it is the best reason to believe that Allen could reverse course on retirement right now, hop on an elliptical trainer for a couple weeks, and then come back to play twenty-odd minutes of productive basketball for any team in the NBA for the rest of this season and roughly as many more seasons as seemed interesting. There is no sense in describing it, really. Everyone who has ever shot a basketball already knows what it looks like, because it is what everyone shooting a basketball aspires to in that moment, and it never changed. No one in his era of NBA stars shot the ball more beautifully than Allen, and the metronomic ease of the shot owed a great deal to the fact that no one shot more—in empty gyms, before or after practice or games—than Allen did. The shot was what in the evocative un-language of baseball scouts would be called Allen's "carrying tool," but it was also in every way a life's work, and absolutely and undeniably a masterpiece.

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But it was, for the first decade of Allen's career, just part of a balanced and uniquely coherent suite of skills, each of which he used to enhance the other. The shot created the circumstances for swift, swooping drives; the athletic ability that Allen refined into that perfect and perfectly repeatable shot also found more violent expression in his finishes at the rim. Everything made sense with everything else, it was all as smooth and seamless in real time as it is in memory, but Allen would also absolutely dunk right up in your face.

— SLAM Magazine (@SLAMonline)November 1, 2016

Allen was the greatest perimeter player of an era that now seems very long ago—his 269 three-pointers in 2005-06 set a NBA record, but Stephen Curry has broken that record three times all by himself; the mark currently stands at 402 threes in a season, which breaks down to Curry making about 1.33 more triples per game than Allen at his peak—and it was his genius from out there that kept him playing so deep into this one. But the thing to remember about Allen, and the thing that stood out even as he began refining his game down toward the essentials, was how much everything he did depended upon everything else, and how much sense it all made together.

The challenge of living is, in large part, learning to live with who we are. This is tough enough for mortals learning to manage our stupid tendencies and various silly shames, but for basketball players who are however briefly able to touch the level above this one, the descent can be horrifying. Some deal with it better than others, but great players generally struggle greatly. They thrash through repetitions, closer and closer to earth by the moment, and wonder and rage at the new and disappointing results that their labors bring them. Think of Kobe at the end, building and destroying ever more elaborate and ever more obviously structurally unsound dream palaces, flattening would-be allies and breaking his own body, all because he could not and would not change a single thing. This is one way it can go, and one very common tragicomic way for a hero's journey to end.

What's astonishing about Allen, both at his height and then in his virtuosically distilled and reduced endgame, was how lightly he wore his brilliance, and how well he managed his decline. Parts of his game fell away, or time took them, and he let them go. And he kept winning that way, by holding on to what he could keep for as long as he could do it, and not fighting the fights he could not win over everything else. It makes sense that he'd know when he didn't want to hold on anymore, and to go when it was time to go. It makes sense, too, that he'd have that all figured out a little bit before everyone else did.

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