Paul Pierce Would Have Preferred if Ray Allen Joined Kobe Bryant Instead of LeBron James

Player movement in the NBA is so common that it rarely hurts anybody’s feelings. There are exceptions, though, especially when a player abandons the current team and joins a rival.

It’s been nearly a decade since Kevin Durant left the OKC Thunder to join the Golden Warriors, the team that he’d just lost to in the 2016 Western Conference Finals. And people are still salty about it.

Durant’s decision reverberated around the NBA and made Golden State nearly invincible for the next two years. But it wasn’t the first time that a star made such a traitorous move. Ray Allen’s move to the Miami Heat in 2012, for instance, will always be remembered for how it fractured friendships.

Allen came to the Boston Celtics in 2007 with Kevin Garnett. Together with Paul Pierce and Rajon Rondo, they won the 2008 title. Four years later, he left for the Heat, right after Miami knocked Boston out in seven games in an epic Eastern Conference Finals.

On the court, Allen’s decision paid off, as he hit one of the most famous clutch shots of all-time in the 2013 Finals to help the Heat win their second ring in a row. Off the court, Allen was seen as someone who abandoned the brotherhood that had meant so much.

Allen, while justifying his move, had said that he felt mistreated by the Celtics’ front office and was unhappy with his role and usage. But his former teammate, Paul Pierce, wishes he had done literally anything except join forces with LeBron James.

“It was absolutely where he went,” Pierce told Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay. “You gotta understand, we’ve been battling LeBron for the last four or five years… The Heat aren’t our rival, it’s LeBron. He’s our rival. So like dude, we just played them in the playoffs a year ago, you can’t go play with them.”

The Celtics hated LeBron so much that Pierce suggested that it would have been better if Allen had instead gone to the Celtics’ all-time greatest rival. “I would [have] been better off [with] him going to the Lakers, and that’s our biggest rival,” he said. “I would [have] been cooler with him doing that.”

That’s saying a lot. The Celtics and Lakers have been basketball’s most bitter rivals for over half a century. Even during Pierce’s era, they had met twice in the Finals, with each team winning once.

Saying he’d be OK with Allen leaving to join forces with Kobe Bryant in purple and gold seems unthinkable. But it speaks volumes about just how fierce those battles with LeBron were.

As far as Pierce sees it, the problem was that Allen didn’t communicate with his teammates at all before he left. Even if his issues with the front office convinced him of leaving, Pierce says he would have been more understanding if Allen had just opened up about what was going on in his mind.

“I think the biggest issue, Shannon, was [that] we didn’t have no conversation with him,” Pierce said. “We was a brotherhood. When you win, and our wives are friends, our kids are friends, we’re doing family stuff, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and for you to abruptly leave without a conversation, like, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about doing this.’ We built something here.”

Pierce even suggested he could have intervened on Allen’s behalf with general manager Danny Ainge or team owner Wyc Grousbeck. But Allen didn’t give him that chance.

The ice has thawed a little in the years since, but it’s taken a long time. Kevin Garnett famously froze Allen out for years, only to finally mend fences when Allen attended his jersey retirement ceremony in 2022. Pierce is still talking about the way things ended, so there’s clearly still some bitterness there.