Remain Calm

Ever since Ray Allen announced last Friday night that he had decided to sign with the champion Miami Heat instead of returning to the Celtics (even though the Celtics could offer him twice as much money), the inevitable back-and-forth which occurs when any two sides end a relationship had quietly been going on. First came the 'sources' saying Ray wasn't happy that he wasn't the Celtics' top priority this offseason, then that he was upset that he was constantly dangled in trade rumors during his last two years here and now there are rumblings that he and point guard Rajon Rondo were never as close as we all thought. The Celtics maintain they honestly tried to sign Ray and wish he would have stayed, even as they signed other players first. While this kind of he said/he said is not going to make either side come out looking very professional, it is not like the Celtics are some great free agency destination and this is going to derail their plans. (Besides this is the city where the Red Sox, the kings of burning bridges, operate. As long as there are no leaks from within the organization contending Ray had a drug problem than the Celtics will continues to look like the picture of restraint.) The other articles which have been coming out as part of the fall-out have been many sports writers telling Boston sports fans they shouldn't be calling Ray Allen a traitor. Well, I'm here to let them know that the problem has been solved, because we never were.

Honestly, in all the people I talked to, I never once heard anyone say a single bad word about Ray Allen or the way he ended his time here. He helped win the team a championship and we all wished that he would have re-signed or that if was intent on leaving he had signed with a team other than the one which has eliminated the Celtics from the playoffs for two straight seasons, but this is the nature of the business. Trades happen and professional athletes change teams all the time. Hell, if they didn't Ray Allen would never have landed here in the first place. Not to mention by the end of last season Ray was coming off the bench and didn't seem too happy about it, which is why the Celtics signed Jason Terry this offseason. Terry might not be as good a player as Allen, but certainly will fill that role better. On top of all that, the majority of Celtics fans overwhelmingly wanted the Celtics to make Kevin Garnett the priority in free agency, so if that upset Ray Allen I think we were willing to live with those consequences. Lastly, Allen is a shooter and those guys can lose it overnight, so watching him against the 76ers in the playoffs we were all secretly fearing he might not have much left. When you add all those things up most people were ready and expecting Allen to leave long before he actually agreed to take his talents to South Beach.

That is why these "you can't get mad at Allen" articles have been annoying me so much. First off, I can't stand it when sports writers think they have the right to tell sports fans who to cheer or boo. As long as they shut up during the National Anthem and keep families out of their heckling, fans have the right to get on any player they wish. But the main reason these articles have been particularly troubling to me is that they also combine a second, bigger pet peeve: I hate it when sports writers (or any commentators, really) do this maneuver of creating a controversy which isn't there and then scolds us for how we are reacting to it, even though 95% of the population isn't even doing it. It's internet trolling in newspaper form and, seriously, that crap is infuriating. I'd like to think the only reason it is happening is because at the moment we are in a sports dead-zone. Basketball free agency is pretty much already over, football doesn't start for another month, hockey is quiet until September and the Red Sox have another 80 games to go in what has been a pretty boring season (even by baseball standards). So, the Ray Allen news is pretty much all they have to work with and they need to milk it for all its worth. Plus, it's a simple column to write. When you make up a stupid issue it is quite easy to be on the correct side of it and the only people who are going to write in to tell you how wrong you are are the lunatic-fringe who should be ignored. But just because it is easy doesn't make it worth writing.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and say that the entire city of Boston was on its best behavior when the news broke. I didn't look online when the signing was first announced but I know how the internet works, so I'll readily concede that some people probably said some things online, shrouded behind internet anonymity, that they never should have said. But in every city with a passionate sports base you will get those crazy callers to the sports talk radio shows who say outrageous things and for some reason they tend to be seen as the voice of an entire fanbase, even though they usually only represent the fringes. Rest assured that they don't speak for the majority of us who are quite level-headed and understanding about a professional athlete deciding to play in a tax-free, warm-weather city with a good chance to play for a championship for only $3 million a year. We'd love for our rational opinions to be heard, we just don't have a spare 45 minutes to wait on hold to tell the guys on the Sports Hub that we wish Ray nothing but the best in every game he plays, minus the ones against the Celtics. So, I would advise all these talking heads on the sports networks to stop telling us to calm down when we're already calm because that is only going to serve to get people riled up and if we do, rest assured, Ray Allen won't be the target of our annoyance.