Skip to main content

Kevin Garnett has No. 5 jersey retired by Celtics, buries hatchet with former teammate Ray Allen


 


The Boston Celtics honored one of the greats to ever play for the franchise on Sunday when they retired Kevin Garnett's No. 5 jersey. A ton of former Celtics greats were in attendance for the momentous occasion, including one that hasn't the greatest relationship with Garnett in recent years: Ray Allen.


Garnett took the time to point out that Allen was on hand for the ceremony during his speech.


"It's good to see Ray Allen here," Garnett said, before the pair of former teammates hugged. "Real s---. It's good to see you, man. You next, dog."


Garnett and Allen hadn't spoken to each other much over the past 10 years after Allen chose to sign with the Miami Heat as a free agent in 2012 following the five-year run of Boston's "Big Three" of Garnett, Pierce and Allen.


"Yeah, that's a big one," current Philadelphia 76ers and former Celtics head coach Doc Rivers told ESPN's Tim Bontemps regarding Allen being in attendance. "Because that's been a problem, obviously, and the fact that it looks like the fence is finally coming down is really cool.


"Very, very happy for Kevin, and really cool that Ray came today."


Garnett and Allen reconnected in February at the NBA's All-Star weekend in Cleveland when the league honored members of its 75th anniversary team.


"Just because I moved away doesn't mean that relationship, that friendship, ends. So it did center around Kevin and myself because I did get the sense that the people here felt how Kevin felt," Allen said. "Once he accepted me, then the people accepted me. That was the sense. I was glad we could do that and people could see, 'We won with this guy in 2008, and that's what matters most.'"


Garnett, now a Hall of Fame forward, arrived in Boston in 2007 after spending the first 12 seasons of his NBA career with the Minnesota Timberwolves. During his six seasons with the Celtics, Garnett made five All-Star Game appearances, was an All-NBA First Team selection in 2008, won the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year award in 2008 and made the league's All-Defensive Team on four different occasions.


Without a doubt, Garnett will down as one of the all-time greats to wear a Celtics uniform.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

From Deep: At long last, Nikola Jokic's Nuggets can envision getting to the top of the mountain

  Jamal Murray tore his ACL on April 12, 2021. Leading up to that night, he'd been playing at an All-NBA level for two months: In a 25-game stretch, Murray averaged 24.1 points on .509/.459/.935 shooting splits, 4.2 rebounds and 5.2 assists. He was even more efficient than he was in the bubble playoffs, and his defense had improved, too. Murray only got to play with Aaron Gordon, the Denver Nuggets' big trade-deadline addition, for five games. They won them all except the one in which Murray got injured. In 110 minutes, their new starting five scored slightly more efficiently than any iteration of the Kevin Durant-era death lineup in Golden State and defended like a top-five team. Two Nikola Jokic MVP awards later, Murray is back. So is Michael Porter Jr., who signed a five-year extension about a year ago and needed back surgery nine games into the 2020-21 season. The Nuggets remember how easily everything slid into place with Gordon in the mix. Newcomer Kentavious Caldwell-Pop...

Klay Thompson to sit out Warriors preseason games in Japan as Kerr says he needs more time to ramp-up

  Klay Thompson may have returned healthy to the Golden State Warriors last season, but the scars from his two missed seasons are still quite visible. The Warriors played their first of two preseason games against the Washington Wizards on Friday and will play another on Sunday, but Warriors coach Steve Kerr said that Thompson will not be playing at all during the trip to Japan. "Just feel more comfortable giving him a little more of a ramp up," Kerr said before Friday's victory over Washington. "He's just not quite ready to play at this point just based on where, you know, we're so early in camp. We just want to be safe and make sure he gets a good ramp-up before he plays in games." Typically, so little time to ramp up wouldn't be a problem for a veteran in a preseason context. The games tend to be so low-impact and demand so few minutes out of a team's best players that they can safely jog through them. Stephen Curry and Draymond Green played 1...

LeBron James says he has 'no relationship' with Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  It's not a matter of if LeBron James passes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the No. 1 spot on the NBA's all-time scoring list, it's when. James sits just 1,326 points away from passing the Hall of Famer and Los Angeles Lakers legend, a milestone that should happen at some point this season given James is still performing at peak levels and is coming off a year in which he averaged over 30 points a night. If he averages around the same amount of points as he did a season ago for the Lakers, James could break the record somewhere in the middle of the season, assuming he stays healthy. It's a highly anticipated moment heading into the season, but in regards to LeBron's thoughts about and his relationship with Abdul-Jabbar, he didn't have much to say on the matter. Following the Lakers first preseason game Monday night, a reporter asked James what his thoughts were on the Lakers legend and if the two had any relationship, to which LeBron gave a very short answer. "No...