RollingWave wrote:The problem is that a lot of things attached to him are not matched up with the end result, for example, the Celtics were 6-24 with Rondo this year (20%!!!) and 19-37 without him. (34%) , this is the second strait year where the Celtics were a better team without Rondo. (they were 18-20 when he went down last year, 23-20 the rest of the way.)
That is indeed a concern, but they are a tanking team. Rondo was not 100%, he came back and he had to adjust to everyone and everyone had to adjust to him. I wouldn't take too much stock in this.
The funny things is that Beverley is actually exceptional in terms of working well with the team, aka the team's +/- was much worse without him. it doesn't matter if he was paired with Lin or Harden or both , when he's around things work. One does wonder if he was actually 100% in the playoffs.
That's good for the regular season, but in the playoffs, it's a big disadvantage.
Assist is like RBI in baseball, a lot of folks look at a guy with high assist and automatically assume he is a great PG just like some folks look at RBI and assuming 90-100 RBI must mean he's a great hitter, when in reality there's a lot of problem with these assumption.
The Celtics offense with their personnel featured a lot of plays where Rondo makes a small PnR and then dump it off effortlessly to KG or say Brandon Bass for a long 2 jump shot. that count as an assist, that also require almost no skill from the PG to pull off (at least relative to other average PG in the league.) the difficulty is that A. the shooter has to hit the shot and B. even if they do it's usually a pretty blah play in terms of efficiency.
Stat's certainly not the only reason I think he's a good passer. I have watched many games he played, he does a lot of great passes. He is certainly an above average passer. KG was old and Bass can't do much else.
The Rockets almost completely abandon this sort of plays. pick and pop long 2 plays literally are banned in their play books, when they take long twos it's almost always Lin or Harden either in iso or coming out of pick . now personnel is a reason here , as they did do a little bit of that when they still have Patterson. but even then it's not a common play at all but a "hey we'll throw you one of this once every game just so you think we might not always go at the hoop" play.
This is really too bad. Moreyball isn't very smart afterall. Oh, and a lot of the long 2s are jacked when the shot clock winds down.
Some assist are much harder than others, taking it up the court , slow passing to a shooter who hits a very long 3 vs driving past your men, draw a double team then stringing it for a wide open dunk both count as 1 assist but it's obvious which one is harder and more valuable, since almost anyone in the NBA can do the former.
I've certainly seen Rondo do quite a few of those.
Just think about this, in the entire career of Rajon Rondo he has been part of a top 5 offense once, and every other year his team was either a average or horrible offense. this was while playing most of his career with multiple hall of fame players. It's hard to convince me that he is running a good offense when faced with this fact. I use to debate if this was a Doc Rivers thing or on Rajon Rondo, but this year the Clippers had the best offense in the league, so tell me what changed for the same coach.
ASSIST is a mean to the end, the end is the important thing here, which is to have a good offense. the Rockets were 4th and 6th in terms of offensive efficiency in the last 2 years and 2nd in points per game both years, meanwhile, the Boston Celtics in the last 8 season's offensive efficiency (from this year back) were 24th / 24th / 27th / 18th / 15th / 6th / 10th / 28th . so they have 1 good year that was about the same as Rockets last year, and meh to horrible the rest of the way, how can you make an argument that Rondo's a good PG in the face of all this? if we cover up the name then surely you'll say he's one of the worst PG to still hold a job. let alone getting paid over 10 million.
The problem was that the hall of famers were old after a while. So they were 10th for the first year, 6th in the second year, they were still pretty good, but the decline set in the third year when they were 15th. Doc Rivers (and Thibs) probably had something to do with it but it's secondary. The Clips do have CP3 and a young Blake. CP3 is definitely a better shooter and probably a better passer but Rondo makes it up by being real tough, defensively and getting to loose balls.
He has his issues of course but it's too much to call him one of the worst starting PGs. He needs suitable players around him but I don't think he's overrated. I don't think he would fit here anyways, especially if his jumper isn't good yet. His D is great there should be no doubt. Think about it, without the not 3, not 4s etc, they would be in the finals even just two years ago with Rondo as the main guy. It was too bad Doc Rivers wasn't good enough with Thibs gone (IMO he's a good for RS but not so much in the PO) and Ainge not getting good role player replacements for Brown and Posey. It'd be interesting to see what he can do with good health, a better jumper and suitable players surrounding him. He's just coming into his prime right now.