I like Rondo and he's a good point guard, but my point is that if he's going to be a perenial allstar, we're going to see some evidence of improvement real soon. He's already good, I just wonder if he will be great.
If your looking for him to turn into a CP3/deron level allstar, i think your overvaluing him. He's an excellent defensive PG with great quickness.
He's going to be a very good player, i think he'll be a multiple all star player, but he's not going to be a guy that gets penciled in every year, he'll be a guy that always plays very well, and sometimes has outstanding seasons.
But CP3/deron williams he is not, unless, as i said before he somehow highlanders ray allen's jumpshot.
Great Highlander line. I agree that he most likely will not be a perrennial All-Star. He will suffer from the same mindset that has prevented D.J. from being in the Hall of Fame: Defense just isn't valued by the media. Real defense, I mean. Chris Paul made second team All-Defense last year, and he isn't half the defender that Rondo is. Sure, he gets steals, and is quite good at that. Yet we saw him play us twice last season, and was completely unable to stop Rondo... yet Rondo did a very fine job on him. Their stats were almost identical head to head, yet Rondo isn't the offensive talent that Paul is, nor did he have the ball as much. Does that mean that Rondo is as good as Paul? Nope, but Paul's great offense and lesser defense was stalemated by Rondo's great defense and lesser offense.
D.J. was very well respected on defense, and made many All Star and All-Defensive teams, but when it came time for him to get put into the Hall of Fame, he didn't make it. Why? All you heard was B.S. about how his stats weren't good enough. Next to nothing about how D.J. would completey obliterate the guy he was guarding night in and night out with his D. Sure he wasn't putting up big offensive numbers, but he made his man's numbers look really bad and helped two different teams win Titles in the process.
In today's stat obsessed environment a guy like Rondo will tend to suffer. Someone like Mo Williams is considered "better" than Rondo. Rondo smoked that guy last season, and he dominated him in the first game this season. I actually think that the fans around here don't really understand how good Rondo is on the defensive end. He plays without a net 95% of the time. He is expected to take his man on, single up, AND help the others. You rarely see another Celtic anywhere near him unless it is a pick and roll, and that is a two man play. One of the main reasons that we hold teams to the percentage that we do is that our defense rarely has to collapse. Rondo is primarily responsible for that. A lot of teams cheat their defense to help out their point guards. Ours doesn't when Rondo is in there, and that allows the other 4 to stay home on their man.
It is routine, now, for our opponents to bring the ball up with a wing because of the pressure Rondo can put on the ball when he chooses to. Have you ever seen Rondo need someone else to take the ball up for him? How often do you see a team go at him on switches? How effective are pick and rolls against us? All he needs is for the big man to slow up his man a bit, and Rondo recovers the vast majority of the time. His ability to deny the ball is unparalled, IMO. Thibodeau has him playing very conservatively on the defensive end, yet he is still 6th in the league in steals. If he gambled as much as the guys ahead of him, and played more minutes, he'd be a lot higher. The kid makes steals that you don't see anyone else make, especially that poke from behind deal.
Personally I think that Rondo could realistically score 18ppg if this offense wasn't funnelling so many shots through Paul, Ray and Kevin. When Garnett went down last season, Rondo averaged 16ppg, shooting between 53 and 55 percent from the field, and was still averaging only 30mpg in that stretch. It wasn't as if he was taking a lot more shots either. He simply had the ball in his hands more, and it kept him in a better rhythm. I'm not advocating that Rondo should be scoring that many, just that he could do so efficiently, just as Paul, Kevin and Ray would score more if they didn't have to defer to each other so much.
All that said, I just don't think that it penetrates much with the press or public at large. If Rondo turned into a vegetable on the defensive end,and saw his scoring go up by 5 points, and his assists by 2, a lot of people would think that he had "improved".
