Ray Allen: Doc Rivers Called off Chris Paul trade to Celtics in 2011
What's the story?
According to a new book by Ray Allen, if not for Doc Rivers, Chris Paul might have joined the Boston Celtics ahead of the 2011-12 campaign.
In case you didn't know...
Chris Paul finally got traded to the Los Angeles Clippers and stayed there till the end of 2016-17 season.
The heart of the matter...
Sean Deveney of Sporting News shared some excerpts from Ray Allen’s upcoming book which is written by Michael Arkush. In one of those excerpts, Allen describes that Doc Rivers didn’t want to trade Rajan Rondo to the New Orleans Pelicans (then the New Orleans Hornets) because of this relationship with the then-Pelicans head coach Monty Williams.
Allen says in his book “In the end, Doc decided he couldn’t do that to their coach, Monty Williams. Doc was a mentor to Monty, having coached him in Orlando. As Allen delved into his relationship with capricious point guards of his career in this book, he tells that Rondo would have been shipped to the New Orleans Pelicans. Allen initially served as a veteran mentor to Rondo, but his relationship with him by 2011 was “in tatters”.
“Allen describes Rondo as a player who expected that he would be treated as a leader without having done the work to deserve the role, and describes the Celtics as an organization that could not figure out how to handle Rondo,” Deveney wrote.
Allen further told that after the trade fell through, Rivers started to build an offense around Rondo. He called the following season as “the most stressed by far. It got to the point that Rondo would not even throw the ball to me.”
What's next?
Ray Allen’s book From the Outside: My Journey through Life and the Game I Love is due out in two weeks.
Author's take
A Boston team that took that Miami Heat team to seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2012 would have had one of the best points of their generation leading the way. The Finals that year could have been a different story. Not to mention the fact that Paul would have provided more long-term stability at the point guard position for the Celtics.