The rest of this season will be fascinating. There's a solid chance we play better without him. I imagine Ray Allen is giddy right now... the tail end of this season could completely vindicate him and prove him right about Rajon.
I'd hope Ray would have enough tact to not be "giddy" over a season ending injury to a past teammate.
It sure seems like that's the mentality around here though.
Well said.
I cannot seem to fathom why some would be happy we just lost our most talented player. It's disturbing.
I still think our two most talented players are Pierce and KG. Hence why the rest of this season will be so fascinating. I'm not happy we lost Rondo. I love Rondo. Plus, Rondo actually had a bit of trade value before the injury and now we're likely going to be stuck in mediocrity for years.
I do think Rondo is supremely overrated on this forum, though. And I do think Ray bailed on this team at least in part, because he didn't feel Rondo's skill set warranted his growing role. There's a lot of smoke surrounding this concept that the team doesn't necessarily enjoy the Rondo-centric offense... so I'm fascinated to see how they react without him. That's not to say I'd prefer this scenario to one with a healthy Rondo on board.
One of my biggest complaints about this season is that the roster was completely dysfunctional. I had preferred a pipedream scenario where we used a collection of some undersized SG's, underwhelming PF's, and draft picks to land a big man who could fix the roster logic. But in a way, Rondo's injury solves many of the issues this Roster had. There's no longer 4 undersized shooting guards splitting 50 minutes. Rondo's injury pushes the PG-sized Bradley to PG... it pushes our biggest guard, Lee, into a permanent starting role. It ensures that Terry remains as a 6th man where he belongs. And it makes it so that one of our most talented players, Barbosa, doesn't unfairly get stuck with random DNP's due to guard-clog (these guys now have an additional 43 minutes of playing time that they can all gobble up). It frees up our 4th best player, Jeff Green, to actually use his talents instead of trying to conform into something he's not. It will give us the option of actually trying to post-up once in a while without the concern of taking the ball out of Rondo's hands, clogging up the middle for a Rondo drive... or watching as Rondo's defenders slack off him and double the dude trying to post up. What that means is... Rondo's injury will go a long way to defining roles. This team might actually stand a chance of maximizing their talents. Our best two defensive guards will be starting with very little chance of them getting stuck with awkward size mismatches (like Bradley being stuck guarding Joe JOhnson or something). All of these things weren't possible when your 3rd best player happens to be an all-star whose best attribute is "passing" and worst attribute is "shooting". We loaded up on scorers (not shooters) in the offseason... now we get to actually USE those scorers as they should be used.
Would I prefer trading all the underperformers for something like Josh Smith, Marcin Gortat, Demarcus Cousins, Pau Gasol, etc... and rolling through the rest of the season with a Rondo-lead offense now featuring a influx of legit starting big man talent?.... Absolutely. But this might be interesting too.