Ray Allen Preparing to Leave the Boston Celtics After This Season?

The Celtics won’t have to nearly trade Ray Allen any longer once his current deal expires this summer; he may just walk out of Beantown all by himself. Per the Boston Herald: “Let’s say that after his contract expires on July 1, the Celtics fail to find a major free agent willing to accept a piece of their newfound cap space. If Allen gets a call from Danny Ainge, offering up a one-year deal at above average money, would that be enough to make him stay? Allen paused and grimaced. He wants better security than another one-year deal. He’s tired of sweating out trade deadlines. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said of the scenario. ‘But I don’t want to go into this season, like I have in past seasons, worrying about whether I was going to be traded or not. At this point we want to ride it out, take this thing to the house, and not have the instability of not knowing whether today or tomorrow something is going to happen. For all of us, you deal with that over the course of your career, but wherever I end up after this summer, that has to be the No. 1 mandate. At this time I owe it to my family to be ultimately selfish, because I’ve been a very unselfish team player, and I’ll always do that. But when it comes to myself and my family, I have to make sure that I don’t rock their worlds or put them off kilter in any fashion.’ […] He’s ready to pack up the wagon because he’s not ready to retire. ‘It’s hard to say,’ Allen said of whether he remains a Celtic. ‘The landscape always changes over the summer. Just from what I see around the NBA, there’s a lot of teams that look forward to having me. I just want to be somewhere where I’m valued, cherished and I can go out and play. By no means do I feel tired, or one foot in and one foot out. I attack it that way knowing that every day I can play, I can play 40 minutes, and I want to give that to whatever team I play for. The instant I feel I can’t do that is when I retire. And I’ll know it when it happens. But I don’t now.’ […] Just as Allen’s time as a Celtic could be closing, he recognizes the era of the new Big Three may be two months away from its end. He also understands that the finality will probably be rougher on the fans than the players. Picture Allen as a Bull or Kevin Garnett as a Net. They will live to play another day somewhere else. ‘It gives fans a sense of conclusion, not on their terms, because you want to see this thing go all the way through and we walk into the sunset together,’ Allen said of what seems like an inevitability. ‘That’s what every fan wants from their team and players. As a player it affects you not in such a great fashion as you might think. I have history in other places. It’s my fifth year in Boston and I was in Seattle almost as long and Milwaukee longer. We played some great games here. You just cherish the moment because at some point it has to end. There’s nothing bad you can take away from it because we did so many things. But it can’t last forever.'”