I'm talking about the early 2000's mavs that were amazing offensively and got to the conference finals. They had a seriously good point guard in steve nash, but were like 9th or 10th one year and around 14th the next for assists.
My point was that one player or a team getting lots of assists doesn't necessarily mean that you have a good offense. It is a result of the system you're running. The large assist numbers by rondo lead to some fans (especially on here) overrating what he means to a team's overall offensive production. Of course he is a benefit because he is a great player, but high numbers of assists to rondo don't necessarily lead to high offensive production from his teammates.
I was never knocking rondo at all. All I'm saying is that he benefits from a system and so do his numbers.
This is true. The greatest number that the Rondo homers completely fail to acknowledge is our assist numbers as a team with and without Rondo. People talk about how many extra baskets are created by his 11 assists a game, but that is a gross exhageration. Why? Because last I checked we only average 3 assists more as a team when Rondo is player as opposed to when he isn't.
What does that mean? It means that when Rondo isn't here we have a lot of other skilled playmakers who collect all of those assists that Rondo isn't getting, so the vast majority (70%) of Rondo's assists are being made by other guys instead. What happens if Rondo plays? He records 11 assists, but the rest of the team collectively records 8 assists less because the ball is ALWAYS in Rondo's hands.
Yes that doesn't change the fact that we are 3 assists per game better with Rondo out there (and hence the team DOES generate more assists with him than without him). But what it shows is that Rondo's "critical importance" to the teams passing game is clearly way overblown. If we traded Rondo out for a guy who can give us 5 or 6 assists per game without having the ball in his hands 80% of the time, then we probably wouldn't be producing any fewer assists as a team.
Last year around mod-season some Wizards fan decided that Wall was as good a passer as Rondo but the Wizards were just worse shooters than the Celts and their poor shooting cost him a lot of assists. He looked at all of the Wall passes that led directly to a shot or a turnover when there would have been a shot if not for the turnover and compared that to their efficiency aside from that (makes / (misses + turnovers)) ignoring possessions that led to free throws.
They found that the scoring efficiency from Wall's passes was 44%, the efficiency from all other plays was 35%, and that 9% difference was just over the expected average from an 82games study. They did the same comparison for Rondo and found that while the efficiency from the non-Rondo passes was about the same as the Wizards 35%, the scoring efficiency from Rondo's passes was 56%. the 21% jump was over twice the jump seen by Wall and about 2.5 times the league average.
So while the team is only getting a few less assists a game without Rondo, it will probably take more possessions to get those assisted baskets. Just compare Rondo to Wall, who seems to be average in how efficient his passes are. Rondo gets 11 assists a game. From his 56% efficiency it would take almost 20 possessions (shots or turnovers) to get those 11 baskets. At Wall's 44% conversion rate it would take 25 possessions to get 11 assists.
It's not just the assists you need to look at, it's how efficiently we score off of Rondo's passes.
I don't think rondo being clever and a brilliant executor of passes was ever called into question. A statistic like the one above just feeds the beast of "rondo only passes when he knows he'll get an assist" though. Not saying I'm part of that beast but rondo does benefit from being given the license to hold or dribble the ball for however long it takes during the possession until he does get an assist.
What I said was completely unrelated to "rondo only passes when he knows he'll get an assist". And while it's true that Rondo benefits from having the ball in his hands it's also true that the team benefits from Rondo having the ball in his hands. Look at any good offensive player, wouldn't you say that they benefit from having the ball as much or being allowed to shoot as much as they do?
This has been a very effective system in previous years but this year's personnel seem to benefit greatly from playing without that restriction on them.
I'd still say that's somewhat overblown. If you look at the team in January (aside from Rondo playing hurt) Paul and Terry were both shooting poorly due to injuries, Wilcox was out of the lineup and Green (still getting healthier/re-acclimated to playing) was playing well in spurts but not as consistent.
If you look at the offense since Rondo's been out, with Paul and Terry being healthy and playing well, Green playing better than we've ever seen him play in Boston, Wilcox taking Collins' minutes and the guards playing well you'd have to admit that we're close to firing on all cylinders right now. But then consider that the Rondo-less team, while playing about as good as you could expect them to on offense, aren't playing that much better than when our best offensive players were struggling due to injuries. Couple that with the thought that out of our 15 opponents since Rondo left only *3* teams played better than average defense (and remember how we looked against the Bulls last month). Then consider that our best offensive play this year came in the first month or so of the season when Rondo was healthy and controlling the ball. It's easy to argue that, while a player or two benefit from Rondo being out the team as a whole doesn't.
As I have said previously in above quotes, obviously the team as a whole will suffer when rondo is out because, overall, he is a very good player and he has some great qualities. That said with such a ball dominant point guard that accumulates the sort of stat lines that rondo does, I expected the drop off in offensive production to be much larger than is currently the case after his injury.
You only had to look at the clippers without Chris Paul to see what sort of a shambles their offense was without him. Whilst the clippers went on an immediate losing skid with Paul out, the celtics seem to have trended in the opposite direction, even whilst missing a seriously good contributor in sully. You can attribute this to players having niggling injuries and not being 100% fit while rondo was there if you want, but personally I think that's a bit of a cop out.
My point all along was that rondo, whilst being an all-star does benefit greatly from HOW the celtics play offensively, especially in the assist column. Observing how good Paul, Kevin and Jeff are at executing offensively makes you go "huh, maybe one of the best passers in the game SHOULD be getting 10 assists a game without much trouble, and maybe we shouldn't be making such a big deal out of it."
Topic: Another win w/o a pouting Rondo (Read 19877 times)