Ray Allen was Jesus Shuttlesworth, the star of Spike Lee’s hit movie “He’s Got Game,” just two years after being drafted. That lays bare how fast Allen’s rise to fame and success was as the face of a Milwaukee Bucks team that became quite good quite quickly. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, every young guard who could shoot and finish at the rim was compared to Michael Jordan. It happened to Vince Carter, Kobe Bryant and, of course, Ray Allen. Allen shared the message he received from Jordan.
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Allen and Jordan played each other 12 times, with Jordan taking victory in nine of them. The first of those matchups was on December 6, 1996. Jordan quintupled Allen’s output and was chirping at him all game. It was a heralding moment for Allen.
Allen had come into the league wide-eyed, and seeing the player he considered the GOAT drop 40 points on him was as impressive as it was embarrassing. It was even worse when you consider that the Bulls had also throttled the Bucks in the preseason just two months earlier, where Jordan taunted Allen again!
“I still got a poster of him on my wall in my room, and I’m like, ‘I’m about to play against Michael Jordan?’ So I’m wearing his shoes…” Allen recalled on a recent episode of the Dan Patrick Show. “I see the Bulls run out, and he’s the last one, and I couldn’t believe it … At jump ball, he walks over to me and said, ‘Welcome to the NBA, Ray.‘”
Even that simple gesture was enough to throw Allen off his game. “He actually killed me slowly,” remembered Allen as part of a 2018 interview. Jordan’s style of dominance was not in highlight plays, though he had his fair share of them, but in the plodding course his game took. It was inescapable. He was inescapable.
Despite this and his inability to beat Jordan’s Bulls throughout his career, Ray did figure out how to stare unnerving situations in the face and succeed. Between a championship with the Boston Celtics and one of the greatest shots ever with the 2013 Miami Heat, the shooting guard is cemented in NBA history.
After years of effort, Allen would eventually gain Jordan’s respect. When Allen won the 2008 championship with the Celtics, Jordan came to congratulate the former protege-turned-rival. What did Ray’s GOAT have to say about Boston’s dominant title run?
“Y’all won one. Let’s see if you can win two. That’s when you’ve done something.”
Allen won another title five years later. It seemed he finally reached the standard his mentor left for him.
