Monday night’s “Area 21” segment on TNT’s Inside The NBA featured a 2008 Celtics reunion, with host Kevin Garnett being joined by Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kendrick Perkins, and Glen “Big Baby” Davis. The segment featured plenty of reminiscing and even a video call in from their old coach Doc Rivers, but at some point they had to address the elephant in the room (or, more accurately, not in the room) in Ray Allen’s exclusion from all things Celtics related.
Pierce voiced his desire to settle the issue, but the rest seem less interested in burying the hatchet with Allen. The insistence is that Allen would have to be the first to reach out, and even then the tensions still might be too high. The crux of the issue is that Allen left Boston for their main rival in Miami and failed to give them any heads up that he was leaving.
Davis was a guest on Wednesday’s Undisputed on FS1, where he was grilled by Shannon Sharpe about the Allen beef. Sharpe wasn’t buying Big Baby and the rest of the Celtics’ argument that all Allen had to do was let them know he was going to the Heat, and called Big Baby out on that particular point on a couple of occasions, noting that the real issue they had was that he left for Miami. Big Baby admitted that was a part, but still insisted that the issue was the lack of communication and kept bringing up family. At the very end of the discussion, Skip Bayless asked whether Davis thought Allen would ever get to the point where he would apologize to the Celtics (11:15 mark of the below video).
Sharpe laughed heartily at the question, and Davis found it amusing as well. “Ray…has a better chance of kissing Donald Trump in the mouth,” Big Baby quipped. “That’s never going to happen. Ray is never going to say that.”
Allen’s Facebook post on Tuesday morning seemed to indicate that there was still resentment on his side, but he later claimed he was hacked — as every athlete does when a social media post goes viral in a potentially negative direction. You can choose whether to believe Allen’s verified Facebook page was hacked or not, but whether that post was from him (or his people) or someone else, the animosity between the group and Allen doesn’t seem to be dissipating much even after four years and everyone but Rondo being retired now.
