When we talk about Ray Allen, a lot of us tend to do so in mechanical terms. This is probably because, when you think about him, chances are the first image that flashes to the front of your mind — or second, if you’re a Spike Lee fan — is the pristine purity of his jumper, a shot-doctor’s Platonic ideal, meticulously honed to the point of perfection through thousands of hours of painstaking labor in the gym.

Allen hit plenty of jumpers over the years, including an NBA-record 2,973 from behind the 3-point line, but chances are you’re thinking of one in particular. With good reason. Because it’s one of the greatest shots in the history of the sport.

That shot’s a big part of why we sometimes talk about Allen like he was an automaton. Because the miracle of Allen’s championship-saving right corner 3 in the dying seconds of Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals is that it wasn’t “miraculous” at all. It’s that Allen, a military brat quick to credit his father’s commitment to accountability for instilling him at an early age the importance of unerring consistency, had not only practiced that exact motion; that he had, in fact, been practicing it for years:

As a young player in Milwaukee, Allen invented a drill in which he lies in the key, springs to his feet and backpedals to the corner. A coach throws him a pass. He has to catch and shoot without stepping on the three-point line or the sideline. In Allen’s first training session with the Heat, just after Labor Day 2012, he performed the drill. “It was the first time I ever saw anybody do that,” [Heat head coach Erik] Spoelstra says. “He told me he does it for offensive rebounding purposes. He said, ‘You never know when you’ll be in a situation where you have to find the three-point line without looking down.'”

When the situation came with his team down by three, with nine seconds to go in a game that could have cost him a championship, Allen didn’t have to scramble to get ready. He’d been ready, in position to execute thanks to more than a decade of deliberate, exacting preparation.

“I know you want me to let you in on some big secret to success in the NBA,” Allen wrote in a “Letter to My Younger Self” published on The Players’ Tribune in November 2016, in which he announced his retirement after 18 NBA seasons, 10 All-Star appearances, two championship rings, an Olympic gold medal, and more 3-pointers than anybody else in the history of the game. “The secret is there is no secret. It’s just boring old habits.”

Those “boring old habits” provided the foundation for the defining characteristic of Allen’s brilliant career, which will be recognized Friday with enshrinement in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.: his capacity to endlessly replicate that model form, regardless of game situation, defender or whatever chaos might be swirling around him. First minute or 48th, October or June, night after night, year after year, Allen rose, fired and found the bottom of the net — a catch-and-shoot Terminator, a metronome in the cleanest collection of kicks in the game.

But while that’s all true, and while there’s no doubt that the legendary rigidity of Allen’s pre-game routine frames any conversation of his greatness, I worry a bit that something gets lost when we focus so much on the precise machine logic of his J. Namely: Ray Allen was a hell of a lot more than some 3-point-shooting robot.

Before he was a championship-winning designated sniper, Allen was a full-service monster, earning Big East Player of the Year, All-American and All-Rookie Second Team recognition for his talent at roasting defenders inside and out.

“I remember seeing him play a game against Riverside Church [AAU] a lot of years ago,” legendary UConn coach Jim Calhoun recently told Mike Anthony of the Hartford Courant. “Scored 62 points, didn’t make a 3. He could jump out of the gym and go to the rim.”

As Allen grew into his gifts at the next level, he averaged better than 23 points, four rebounds and four assists per game for an eight-season stretch while serving as the leading light for the Milwaukee Bucks and Seattle SuperSonics. He could handle the ball, work the pick-and-roll, weave his way into the paint and finish in traffic. He could punish smaller defenders in the post, push the ball in transition, elevate and throw down in the face of shot-blockers.