Ray Allen ultimately laughed about the whole idea
There wouldn’t be back-to-back championships for the Miami Heat if it wasn’t for Ray Allen. That’s how the majority of NBA fans sum up the 2013 NBA Finals. And for some haters, it would’ve been a choke moment for LeBron James, who missed a must-make three-pointer before Allen’s dagger from the corner.
While that might be true, Ray-Ray doesn’t see it that way. Instead, Allen implied that the Heat’s triumphant 2013 NBA Finals run culminated in teamwork and James’ leadership.
“Actually, people say I saved LeBron. Well, I saved myself. I had so much to be thankful for with that shot going in, but also so much thanks for LeBron making a 3-pointer two possessions before and Mike Miller hitting a shot with his shoe falling off before that. So many things happened before that moment that put you in that situation. I don’t expect him to say thank you for saving me because I didn’t. He did a lot of the heavy lifting and carried us throughout that year,” Allen told NBA.com in 2021
There was never an issue
No matter how we slice it, the fact remains that Allen was the player who forced the game to overtime when the Heat was just seconds away from blowing their hard-fought journey to the NBA Finals. Yes, James was hailed the Finals MVP after the momentum shifted to the Heat’s side, but it was Allen who gave Miami a glimmer of hope. Allen doesn’t want to argue about it and just laughs it off when asked if LeBron sends him a card for it every Christmas.
“(Laughs) He does not, but maybe you should say he should,” Allen joked.
That shot had been there
Back to the dagger, people will still be talking about it for years as if LeBron was lucky that Chris Bosh grabbed the rebound and Allen happened to be in the right place at the right time. But for Ray-Ray, that shot had already been ingrained in his system, and regardless of the circumstance of the final seconds of Game 6, Allen said he still would’ve been prepared to shoot it.
“I did it all day that day (in warmups), and I’d been doing it for years on top of years. It goes back to my training. I grew up in a military family, and when you go to war, it’s about the training. Once you go to war, you can’t control what comes at you, but you can control how you stay calm and stay focused on how you’re prepared. We don’t know what’s going to come at us, but we have to know how to make decisions. In that situation, I made a decision,” he reflected.