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Ray-Ray Focused on 08' Season Despite Contract Status September 12, 2009 – At 34 years of age, Ray Allen is entering the final year of a five-year, $85 million deal he signed with the team formally known as the Seattle SuperSonics.
In attendance at Friday’s Hall-of-Fame induction, Ray Allen was hesitant to address the question of being in the last of his contract.
“Of course, but it will be dealt with in its time,” said Allen, when asked whether he would like to play more years in Boston. “My job doesn’t change. I gotta go out and do the same things. We get paid to play basketball. We’re all in a great situation so we can’t look past this year.”
Many teams have focused on freeing up cap space for the 2010 free-agent class which features names like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and Amare Stoudemire. But if Allen was at all concerned about the prospects of being an afterthought in such a strong class, he deflected directly to the upcoming season.
“We’re excited. Being veteran players, we all know what we’re playing for and the feeling we had in ’08, we want to get back to that,” he said. “And Rasheed (Wallace) wants to get back to the feeling when he won a championship as well. So it’s not about individuals, we know we’ve got to come together collectively as a team and try to find the best chemistry to make this thing work so we can be that dominant team like we were in ’08.’
“We always talk about teams on paper that could contend for championships and on paper, we look pretty good right now but we have to get back to that same mantra of umbutu (a South African term for “I exist for you”) where everybody is on the same page and everybody is trying to make each other better,” he said. “But we do believe we have the right guys to do it. The organization did everything they could over the summertime to put us in contention and now it’s up to us players to get the job done.”
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