The Rajon Rondo I'll Remember

Today, we are happy to offer a guest column from Evans Clinchy, who is a Friend of The Lose despite the fact that he took a platter of oysters from me in a bet on how many games OKC would win in the first half of the NBA season. I refer to him as “Evans Ainge” because he’s a long time Boston Celtics guy, and I bounce all sorts of weird trade ideas and scenarios for the C’s off of him, to which he usually replies with things like, “Who are you again?” and, “Do I know you?” Evans is a seasoned vet on the NBA beat, both in New England and in the Pacific Northwest, and you can find him online at twitter.com/evansclinchy and also at evansclinchy.tumblr.com.

THEY say a picture is worth a thousand words, which means simple arithmetic dictates I shouldn’t even bother writing this piece. The animated GIF you see above basically constitutes a mammoth essay – tens of thousands of words – about how I want to remember Rajon Rondo.

That play took place seven years ago today. It was May 9, 2010, and the Celtics were down 2-1 in their second-round playoff series against the Cavaliers. Game 4 was a big nationally televised showdown on a Sunday afternoon. It was Mother’s Day. It was a must-win game for the Celtics, and a chance for the Cavs to move one step closer to that elusive first championship.

It was a game Rondo would absolutely own.

For that one afternoon, it felt like the best basketball player in the universe was in the building and LeBron James was too. LeBron in 2010 was just about at his peak. He’d just won the second of his four MVPs. He was everything to those Cavaliers – their emotional leader, their leading scorer, playmaker, defensive Swiss Army knife. He was the clear best all-around player in the game. But for one day, Rondo out-LeBronned LeBron. He stole the show. He finished that afternoon with 29 points, 18 rebounds and 13 assists, carrying the Celtics to a season-saving win. Those numbers – only Oscar Robertson (32-19-13) and Wilt Chamberlain (29-36-13) had ever matched all three in a playoff game. Not even King James was that good.

That win swung the series. The Celtics had been down 2-1; first they evened the score, then they blew the Cavs’ doors off in a shocking Game 5 blowout in Cleveland, then they ended it in Game 6 at home. At series’ end, LeBron famously ripped his Cavaliers jersey off in the hallway heading to the TD Garden visitors’ locker room. That summer, he left for Miami. The NBA’s monarch had been chased out of town by a 24-year-old point guard who couldn’t shoot.

That’s the thing about peak Rajon Rondo. He wasn’t just disgustingly good at basketball (although he certainly was that) – more than that, he was historically significant. That Mother’s Day in 2010 propelled the Celtics to the NBA Finals, where they came within one ridiculous Ron Artest 3-pointer of winning their 18th championship. It also brought the 2000s Cavaliers, once a true NBA powerhouse, to their knees.

A lot can change in seven years. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon up close. In 2010, I was a Celtics beat reporter, following the team around and chronicling their Cinderella playoff run. I was in the front row for Doc Rivers’ postgame news conference on May 9 when he sat and gushed for minutes on end about how he’d never seen a point guard like Rondo before. In 2017, I sat alone in a musty dive bar in Washington, D.C. and sipped a DC Brau Public Pale Ale as the Chicago Bulls, with Rondo watching from the bench, blew a 2-0 series lead and were eliminated in the first round by the Celtics. The series swung when Rondo fractured his right thumb and sat out Games 3 through 6. In 2010, his presence was enough to slay giants; in ‘17, his absence paved the way for the mercy killing of a shitty pseudo-playoff team that all of America was praying would go home anyway.

It was a slow burn that brought us to this point. Rondo stayed in peak form for another couple of years after that magical 2010 run; he was an All-Star and the best player on a strong East contender in 2011 and 2012, taking the Celtics as far as he could each spring before being eliminated by LeBron’s Heat both years. The downfall began in 2013. On January 25, he drove to the basket late in a Friday night game against the Atlanta Hawks and tweaked his knee; he played 12 more minutes on the bad leg before the night was done. That weekend, he discovered he’d been playing on a torn ACL. He would miss almost a full 12 months before returning the following January. He wasn’t the same after that; he’d lost a step athletically, and he also wasn’t flanked by multiple Hall of Fame teammates. The Celtics had begun a rebuild in his absence.

Eventually, that rebuilding effort grew to include shipping Rondo away. He went to Dallas, where he fit so poorly that coach Rick Carlisle basically told him to stay home from a playoff game in April 2015. From there, he signed a make-good contract for one year in Sacramento. It turned out to be a make-mediocre; he averaged 12 points and 12 assists a game, but also alienated teammates and coaches and got in a heap of trouble for outing a gay referee by directing ugly homophobic slurs his way during a game. Through it all, Rondo remained just barely employable enough to get another gig, signing with the Bulls last summer.

This year was odd. The Bulls got off to a hellacious start, going 8-4 in their first 12 games and boasting the top offense in the NBA. Rondo was a key part of it. Then the losing started, and so did the pouting. Rondo and Fred Hoiberg soured on one another fast; Hoiberg benched his starting point guard by New Year’s. By late January, Rondo was taking to Instagram to publicly vent about the Bulls’ veteran leadership, stating in no uncertain terms that Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade couldn’t lead a team like his old pals in Boston, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. The Bulls were in disarray. They were just barely treading water in the East playoff race, and even when they won, it was the ugliest show on hardwood.

Rondo randomly had a late-season renaissance in March; he dropped 24 on the Raptors one night (including four 3-pointers!) and had 15 assists in a surprising win over the Cavaliers. He led the Bulls back from the brink of playoff death, and they snuck into the playoffs as a No. 8. He then averaged a double-double in Chicago’s first two playoff games against Boston, his former team; then, of course, came the thumb injury. The Bulls are now outside the playoffs looking in, and a summer of uncertainty awaits. The team has an option to bring Rondo back. They probably will, but they’re not exactly thrilled about it. Rondo is past his prime, and the Bulls don’t have any viable path to being truly competitive again, with or without him.

It’s weird to think about how we got here. Rondo’s star has fallen so far, so fast. He’s still only 31 years old today. He could still be a great player! Why isn’t he?

This question has been asked and answered to death over the last three years. The debate has raged on since 2014, when Rondo returned post-ACL to a young, rebuilding Celtics team that was in the tank. They had a 15-game stretch late that spring when they went 1-14, and questions about Rondo’s decline began seeping into the national discourse. Some speculated that it was the injury – he just wasn’t the same player without two healthy knees. Others cited his surroundings – without Garnett, Pierce and Ray Allen to pass to, what’s a pass-first point guard to do? Still others theorized that the game had passed Rondo by. He was a non-shooting perimeter player in a fast-modernizing NBA that valued shooting at all five positions. The game was no longer holding a place for him.

Me, I’m tired of the debate. I think it’s clear at this point that the correct answer is some combination of all three, and I don’t have much interest in quibbling over precisely how much of each thing it is. I do think that there’s also a fascinating psychological component there – Rondo was used to being an important NBA player from a young age, and it became difficult to cope when he was forced to transition into being “just another guy.” Rondo was the starting point guard for a championship team at 22. He outplayed LeBron in a playoff series at 24. When you start your career off with such unmitigated success, it’s hard to grapple with the fact that life won’t always be that way.

I can relate. In a lot of ways, my life has mirrored Rondo’s. He was born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to the Celtics when drafted in 2006; I was also born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to Boston for college. In 2006, I got started writing about the Celtics in a column for my college paper. In 2008, Rondo won a title; my first professional journalism gig was covering the team’s victory parade. In 2010, Rondo was briefly on top of the basketball world, at least in terms of individual stardom; I had a job right out of college covering him, which pretty much felt like the pinnacle of life for me, too.

Rondo had his flaws and so did I. He was a basketball player who didn’t particularly like taking jump shots; I was a journalist who didn’t particularly like reporting. We both could be a little prickly when authority figures rubbed us the wrong way. We both also fell victim to timing and circumstance and luck. Long story short, he’s now a fringe starter on a relatively crappy team and I now have a relatively boring desk job.

I try to avoid thinking of either Rondo or myself as someone who peaked at 24, though. Human beings don’t necessarily have “peaks,” anyway. Time isn’t a flat circle, or however the hell that cliché goes. Life brings all sorts of ups and downs and sidewayses.

Rondo, warts and all, will kinda always be my favorite player. He’s talented and misunderstood and enigmatic and flawed and stubborn and maddening and endlessly compelling. There’s so much there to unpack. I’ll probably never be truly done unpacking it.

I continue to hope for the best for Rondo, even though I know nothing he does now can ever live up to the old days. I’m still a sucker for the little mini-redemption stories, like the one he spun for us in March and April this year. And no matter how far he declines, I still try to remember the good times.

Seven years ago today, Rajon Rondo gave the second-best performance I’ve ever seen in person. (The best was Game 6 of the East finals in 2012, when LeBron dropped 45 in an elimination game and singlehandedly saved Miami’s season on the road in Boston.) I’m still thinking about that Mother’s Day today. I think it’s part of the human condition that we go through life doing our best to conjure up the good memories and suppress the bad ones. The ACL tear, the Dallas fiasco, the Bill Kennedy incident, the Instagram post – I do my best to forget those things ever happened. I try to remember Rondo my way – putting up triple-doubles on national television, faking the King out of his shoes and just generally being a badass. That’s the Rondo I’ll remember.

Upside Down

Giannis gives zero fucks about your wimpy shot attempt

WHAT was most striking about the first round of the playoffs to me was the absence of upside, which goes a long way towards explaining why there were virtually no upsets or any real surprises. There were some great games, to be sure, but one of the reasons that surprises come about in the NBA playoffs is that a young team finally puts it all together and raises their game to a new level. You could argue this is the case with the Utah Jazz, the only lower-seeded team to win a series, a former doormat who have slowly, steadily built themselves into a 50-win team. But I wouldn’t really think of this as being that much of an upset. The Jazz were a #5 seed, but they had the exact same 51-31 record as the Clippers during the regular season. I could see the Jazz winning this series beforehand, even before the assortment of in-series injuries, simply because the Clippers are the Clippers and are prone to throwing up on themselves at the most inopportune of moments.

Which they did, of course, because the Clips are gonna Clip.

But otherwise, the seeds held to form. There were some scary moments for a couple members of the NBA élite here and there – most notably in the Boston-Chicago series, which was one of the strangest playoff series I’ve ever seen – but ultimately the bluebloods prevailed. And I was mentioning before about how you want to see teams progress and take strides and raise their game, what was interesting to me, as a disciple of failure, was just how little game any of the eight losing teams had to raise. There was an absence of upside on display. The vanquished all seem to be asking the same questions here in the offseason: where are we going from here? What are we doing from this point onward?

With one big exception, of course: the Milwaukee Bucks. The Lose loves me some Bucks. Milwaukee got a #6 seed this year despite the fact that their 2nd- and 3rd-best players, Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton, each basically missed half the season. Giannis is likely to be in the 5th-7th range of MVP voting, and with good reason: he was the first player in league history to lead his team in scoring, rebounding, assists, blocks, and steals – an accomplishment which got swept under the rug thanks to TRIPLE DOUBLES! BRIGHT SHINY ROUND NUMBER OBJECTS! Anyway, where was I … oh right, Giannis. He’s a beast. He’s going to win an MVP one day. The Bucks need more shooting and their lack of experience showed in their first-round loss to Toronto in six games, squandering a 2-1 lead and then also squandering a last-minute lead in Game 6 after one of the most inspired runs imaginable, a 34-7 run to erase a 25-point Raps lead. Giannis was dead on his feet and the Bucks were exhausted, so they couldn’t close the deal in Game 6, and I’m annoyed because now we get the usual unwatchable Raptors garbage on offense here in the second round instead of the Bucks against Cleveland, who would have been much more fun. Whereas Cleveland is clearly in Toronto’s heads, the Bucks would have given zero fucks about Cleveland mystique. Giannis gives zero fucks about LeBron. He would have just taken it right at him, hell bent on dunking on him and daring LeBron to actually play some position defense for a change. It would’ve been fun to watch, even if the Bucks were certain to go down in flames.

So we love Milwaukee and everyone in the East should fear the deer going forward. But these other seven first-round losers? Yuck. They’re either going in circles or they’re taking on water. I have no idea what any of them do going forward.

At some point during the bloodbath that was Game 4 in Portland, TNT pointed out that the Blazers have every single player on their roster under contract for next season. If you watched the Blazers at all this season, you wouldn’t think that was a good thing. Portland had the second-largest payroll in the NBA this year, believe it or not, having gone mad last summer and doled out enormous contracts to backup guys who contributed little to nothing this season. It’s not all bad, of course – the Nurkic trade was genius, and Denver also gave them a first round pick in that deal, meaning they have three of those in the upcoming draft. Add Nurkic to Lillard and McCollum and you’ve got something good there going forward, but the rest of the front court is a mess and the backup centers are all sub-zero. There has been talk in NBA media circles about how a model based upon two short guards who can’t defend anyone isn’t sustainable, suggesting that Portland make a deal for either C.J. or Dame. This seems nuts to me, since the drop off from the two of them to the rest of the guys on the roster is so vast, but what do you do going forward?

Memphis is in even worse shape. Pluses are you’ve got coach Fiz, who we love, and Mike Conley is great and so is Marc Gasol. But both those guys are now on the bad side of 30, and those two combined with the albatross that is Chandler Parsons’ contract add up to about $85 million on the books for next season. Parsons had micro fracture surgery on his knee, which is a brutal, last-ditch sort of procedure that rarely leads to positive results. The core of this team is ancient – Vince Carter is 40, Zac Randolph 36, Tony Allen 35 – all three of those guys are free agents, but Memphis has no flexibility. Their young players aren’t very good, and they’ve traded away two of their next three draft picks. Grit & Grind might wind up being ground into dust.

What are the Atlanta Hawks? Did you know they’ve made the playoffs 11 straight years? There isn’t a more vanilla franchise in the NBA than the Hawks, who probably have to re-sign, and overpay, Paul Millsap since he’s the only guy on the roster who is in the top half of the league at his position. The Hawks win with defense, and maybe Schröder’s first round performance against the Buzzards foretells something good going forward at the point, but running out Crazy Legs Bazemore and the ghost of Dwight Howard isn’t getting you anywhere. The Hawks were schizophrenic this season, going on long losing skids followed by long upswings. That they got a #5 seed owed more to continued Eastern mediocrity than anything they did on the court, since nothing about this team makes sense.

The Pacers make even less sense. What was this team was attempting to do this season? They have a superstar, Paul George, who clearly doesn’t want to be there. George is a free agent in 2018, and if he makes all-NBA this season, the Pacers will have the opportunity to offer him the enormous DP extension newly negotiated into the CBA. This is supposed to be a way for teams to keep the stars they’ve developed, but it creates a couple of enormous unintended consequences. Indiana would have the peace of mind of knowing they can basically drive a few armored cars up to George’s house and dump the contents in the driveway, but do they want to spend over $200m on a guy who doesn’t want to be there? And George would be insane to turn that down, of course, but does he want to spend his entire career in Indianapolis? What seems likely to wind up happening with these new DP contracts is that guys are going to sign them and then start demanding to be traded later if/when it doesn’t go well, which just makes the process uglier in the long run. And it’s not going well in Indiana, where the Pacers did no phase of the game particularly well this season and have an assortment of miscast pieces. They actually shoot the ball pretty well from three, but their offense doesn’t play to that strength. Larry Bird said before the season he wanted his team to be up-tempo, but then he hired a coach, Nate McMillan, whose teams have always walked the ball up. The Pacers wound up pushing the pace somewhat out of necessity, playing catchup because the defense wasn’t very good. Bird’s now fired himself, leaving GM Kevin Pritchard to clean up the mess and figure out what to do. Best guess is he tries to move George this summer and start all over, but no one is going to give up the sort of assets Pritchard will be looking for simply to rent George for a season.

The extension George might be eligible for in Indy is the same one that Russell Westbrook will be eligible to receive in OKC, a one-time exemption the league has granted and probably shouldn’t have granted. Lost amid all of the small-town loyalty narrative was the fact that it made good business sense for Russ to sign his previous extension last summer. Given that the entire narrative in OKC this year was about what a loyal servant Westbrook was, were he to now say he doesn’t want to sign up for 5/220 or thereabouts, he winds up looking like the biggest phony that there is. He sort of has to take it, at this point, and OKC has to offer it.

But what are you signing on for if you do this? Westbrook got to be the big dog and stuff stats to his heart’s content, but that’s not a winning strategy in the long term, and anyone who thinks that’s miraculously going to change is fooling themselves. This roster outside of Russ is, well, not very good. Their offensive players can’t defend, their defensive-minded players can’t shoot. I have no idea if anyone on this team is actually any good – Oladipo, Adams, you name it – since it’s impossible to view anything that they did this season outside of a Westbrook-dominated context. And that was by design, mind you – Steven Adams played more than 90% of his minutes with Russ on the floor. It only took 86 games before Billy Donovan decided that maybe he should try putting Oladipo on the point for the second unit to attempt to shore up a bench that hemorrhaged points at every turn. What was most remarkable about Westbrook’s season was the fact that he was able to pull so many close games out of his ass, usually against not very good teams, after his teammates had contrived to get themselves into a world of trouble. That’s unsustainable going forward. Nothing about this model is sustainable. You just can’t continue to win, in the modern game, with one guy who is so ball dominant.

And while I hate the way that Westbrook plays, rip Westbrook all the time for being selfish and padding his stats, and think that the most underrated aspect of KD leaving OKC was the fact that he was sick of playing with Westbrook, this team is so poorly constructed at the moment that Russ going all gonzo was, in fact, the only real way this team could compete. But what the hell do you do now? It made sense to sign Oladipo and Adams to extensions, even though you’re still not entirely sure what you’re getting going forward, but now you have no space and no real flexibility to tinker with the roster, especially since you’ve got a monstrous amount of money invested in Enis ‘Can’t Play’ Kanter. Kanter’s probably your best trade asset, if you can find someone dumb enough to take on a guy who can’t guard a chair. Then again, they did manage to get two rotation players in a trade for Cam Payne from the Bulls, so there are dumb guys out there capable of making terrible deals.

Oh, and speaking of the Bulls …

No argument here

It’s hard to imagine a more colossal failure of an organization, top-to-bottom, than the Chicago Bulls. Literally everyone involved in this team whose name isn’t Jimmy Butler ought to just go away. Their gutless, soulless performance in Game 6 – a 105:83 loss to Boston – capped off a gutless, soulless, clueless season. It’s not just that this franchise clearly has no plan going forward, as they’ve thrown one idea at the wall after another looking for something that sticks, but all of those ideas are, in and of themselves, bad ideas.

The single-worst thing that could have happened to this team would have been if they’d managed to somehow win that first round series with the Celtics, because it would have given the impression that the tag-team, slapstick duo of Gar Forman and John Paxson actually knew what they were doing this season. Instead, the second-worst thing happened, which is they won two games, and now they’re talking about bringing back Rondo to run the point even though he spent a large chunk of the season being persona non grata. Rondo’s still a better option at the point than the half-dozen assorted stiffs Fred Holberg trotted out in his stead, the most egregious of which being Michael Carter-Williams, who has devolved into one of the worst offensive players in the game, and the aforementioned Cameron Payne, whom wound up in the D-League and was inactive for the playoffs after GarPax traded two rotation players – Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott – as well as a draft pick in order to acquire him. The entire axis of weasel that was the GarPax machinations surrounding Dougie McBuckets – first trading five draft assets to get him, then giving him away for a used pair of shoes – should be a fireable offense in and of itself. GarPax have certainly not done any favors for supposed offensive genius coach Hoiberg, giving him a claustrophobic roster of misfit toys to work with, but there was Hoiberg trotting out units in the last two games against the Celtics which had never even played together before, and doing dumb things like benching Robin Lopez for the entire 4th Quarter when Lopez pounding the glass and stealing Al Horford’s lunch money was the primary reason the Bulls won two games in the first place. Any resemblance to a clue in this organization is purely coincidental.

And then there are the Clippers. Aah, be still my foolish heart.

The Clippers achieved an inglorious milestone with their Game 7 flop against Utah, as they became the first team in NBA history to lose a playoff series where they held the lead in five consecutive seasons. Now, obviously, you can’t help it when, in 2016, Blake Griffin and Chris Paul both get hurt in the same game. That’s just bad luck, and it was bad luck that Griffin injured his foot against the Jazz. But the Clippers flat out choked against OKC in 2014, and then they choked again against Houston in 2015 – the two seasons which really were their best chances to reach the NBA Finals, but seasons in which they didn’t even manage to reach the conference finals. One way or another, they always come up short.

The core of this team has been together for six years now and not even got past the second round. Paul, Griffin, and J.J. Redick are all free agents. It would cost around $190m or so to bring everyone back. They’ve got no young players to speak of, they’ve traded away picks, they’ve never developed a decent backup point guard, the success of the bench unit is still dependent upon the one game in four in which Jamal Crawford makes shots. The team is stale, don’t seem to like each playing with each other much, and going nowhere.

But at this point, can the Clippers really afford to blow it up? Given the nature of the crowded landscape of sports in Los Angeles, you need stars to be relevant. Paul’s not going anywhere – in his role as president of the players union, he as much as drew up his next contract while writing up the CBA – and if you’re the Clippers, you probably have to re-sign Blake if he wants to come back, because what the else are you going to do? And sure, the roster is stale, but as it is, it’s a roster worth 50-55 wins every season. It isn’t, however, a roster which is winning an NBA title.

But therein lies the problem for all of these teams. None of them are winning a title any time soon, because the Golden State Warriors aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the Cleveland Cavaliers. The latter may be a little more vulnerable simply because of age, but LeBron is still there and he’s an indestructible cyborg. What any of these teams do going forward is ultimately going to be determined by how they can manage their expectations. As much as I glossed over the bland Atlanta Hawks before, it is impressive that they’ve reached the playoffs 11 straight times. The question going forward for all involved here is what is it they can realistically accomplish?

And this goes back to what we’ve asked time and again here at In Play Lose: how is it that we determine what is failure and what is success? Obviously, everyone wants to be winning championships, but there aren’t a whole lot of those to go around. What’s particularly perplexing about building championship winning teams at the NBA level is how the process is, ultimately, somewhat accidental. Remember, the Cavs won the draft lottery four times, and were able to parlay two of those picks into the trade for Kevin Love to put alongside former #1 overall picks LeBron and Kyrie Irving. The Warriors were able to sign Durant because Steph Curry has the single-most team-friendly contract in all of professional sports due to his constant injury problems early in his career. At no point in the rebuilding of the Boston Celtics did Danny Ainge think, “you know, what this team really needs at its core is a 5’9” folk hero of a point guard.” It’s a baffling and befuddling sort of process. And the salary structure of the NBA sort of necessitates that the best teams – which these eight are, by nature of being in the playoffs – ultimately wind up being punished for their success. Successful talent costs more than unsuccessful talent, of course, and with every win, the value of your players rises, complicated by the fact that your dumbest competitors will likely overpay and force you to overpay as well. The most successful counter to this has been the Spurs, of course, with their steady, relentless, and systematic approach over the past 20 years, but lauding them for that also conveniently ignores the fact that the Spurs struck it rich twice in the lottery, first with David Robinson and then with Tim Duncan. You need great players above all else, and great players are damn hard to come by.

And now I’m trying to figure out where the next wave is going to come from. Remember, no one foresaw what’s come about in Cleveland or the Bay Area five years ago. What’s the next wave? It’s fun to think about but impossible to gauge, simply because the game is changing so quickly. As much as the Cavs’ indifference to defense has been decried this season, there is something to be said for the idea that the NBA is such an offense-driven entity now that defense no longer matters. The league’s collective offensive rating this past season was the highest in the 44 years where such data is discernible. Maybe you can, in fact, win a championship without being able to guard the floor on which you are standing.

What most of the first round exiters seem to share, however, is a collective inability at the moment to take advantage of whatever trend is out there. Reboot, rebuild, reset: whatever you want to call it. Whatever you do in the modern NBA, you’d better do it quickly, because the league rapidly reinvents itself and turns itself upside down, so you’d better not find yourself left behind in the dust.