Ray Allen Hitting Mid-Season Blues

Not pretty, not pretty at all. In fact, dare I say ugly? No… I can’t say that. His form is still so pure, yet nothing is finding the bottom of the net. For the whole year Ray Allen has been average at best in his quest to remain a key part of the Celtics starting 5. Maybe he is trying too hard, or maybe he is quite simply having an off year? Whatever the issue is it has sprung up with more intensity during the month of January.

His 3 pointers this month have been abysmal (and if you want the deffinition of abysmal you can find it in the dictionary right next to the word “understatement”). More specifically, though, his 3’s have been off real bad for the past 5 games. On the month his percetentage from deep is 33.3%, which is just a shade under his season average of 34.5%. This is because to start the month, he wasnt doing too bad. But, over the past 5 games….. 16.7%. OUCH. That is 4 out of 24. Not to be a bum or anything, but Rasheed Wallace is 37% from behind the arc in his last 5 games.

Also, his shooting from all areas of the floor has gone down- 44.6% FG% this month, again just below his season average of 45.3%. If you want to get real analytical about it, I guess we could say that means his shooting from inside is actually pretty good. With all of those missed 3’s, his game inside the arc must be alright to be only 1 percentage point under his season average. Is that a fair assumption? Well, yes, if you count the entire month of January. If you want to just count what we have seen over the past 2 weeks, then we are talking about a different story. In the last three games he has shot just 28.9% field goals, and that does include all of those missed lay ups.

Now, onto free throws. If Ray can’t get it done anywhere else on the floor we know sure as heck one place where he can. Afterall, we are talking about Mr. I only miss 1 free throw a month. Guess again. His free throw percentage this month is 84.6%. Still, thats nothing to scoff at, but unfortunately that means he is shooting at around the same pace KG is on the year. Extremely out of charachter he has missed 3 free throws in the last 2 games. Yah, every player does that. WRONG. Not Ray Allen.

So whats the deal? Who knows? We have seen this happen to him before, as this is very similar to the way he started off the 2008 playoffs. We wondered then if he would ever come out of it, and he did. He even put a nice exclamation on it that season with a 7 of 9 from 3 point range in Game 6 of the Finals. The difference this year, however, is that this has dragged on much longer than expected. He has a few good games here and there, but really hasn’t gone on any kind of a stretch. All of his numbers are down, so we can’t help but wonder. All we can do for now is hope that someway, somehow he will snap out of it and have a tremendous 2nd half of the season, and carry it into the playoffs.

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