Well I mean... you gotta figure he adds a lot.
But it's fair to mention that this team was 20-23 fully healthy until Rondo tore his ACL... below .500. And then we finished the season 41-40.
Also fair to note that it had been a growing trend even prior to that where the Celtics tended to win games when Rondo sat... even playoff games. Usually it was because Pierce stepped up in Rondo's absence, ball movement was better and spacing was better since whoever we put in for Rondo was a better shooter by default.
Plus, I used a time machine to prevent Rondo's ACL tear and we still got owned by the Knicks in round 1. Jeff Green was a non-factor in that alternate dimension.
Really, though... without KG and Pierce this team is a 25-38 win squad. I see the ceiling as 38 wins with a fully-healthy Rondo at the helm. I can't imagine us winning more than that without. Our defense was horrible when KG wasn't on the floor. Our offense was brutal without Pierce. They just don't have enough to make the playoffs. And if we won 38 games, it would be seen as a disaster by a lot of fans who would prefer us to land a Top 5 pick in this huge 2014 draft. Without Rondo, I imagine we'd struggle to even win 25 games. That's why you can expect to see heavy Rondo trade rumors in a couple weeks.
I'm going to guess "10". That depends. Do we still have nationally televised games next year? It might be less.
The biggest loss is KG rather than Pierce. Pierce was a big problem for our struggles last year. Our team based struggles were mainly from system standpoint than from a personnel standpoint though, and Doc had a lot to do with it.
Terry and Rondo just didn't play well off each other, particularly defensively. Yet Doc insisted that this was our stating unit. Doc insisted in making Jason freaking Collins our starting center in December, and he stayed there quite some time... I mean, come on!
Our defense was putrid because the Rondo/Terry combination simply didn't work in our perimeter. Pierce did a very poor job defensively throughout the season, making our defense quite porous which was lethal on a team that lacked size and shot blocking outside of KG. And this wasn't help with the demotion of our best wing defender merely because he had a bad start to the season, and benched by Doc too prematurely which obviously worked wonders for his confidence going forward. Yet he stuck by the veteran Terry and overplayed Collins even when they were clearly sucking.
Jeff Green was still recovering. Bradley was out for half a season, only had a month worth of games with Rondo last season together.
Rondo was a problem himself, but I think it had more to do with a team that was very indecisive on the strategy they wanted to use and an over-reliance in players that shouldn't have been relied on to the amount they were.
You remove Pierce and Terry from this team, you have solved a lot of what has plagued Rondo in the last couple of years. Though I still am a bit pessimistic about his willingness to run, there is some truth to the idea that a younger more mobile team is just want Rondo needs, and what this team needs.
All that said, for all the complains we have about our offense, our offense was still pretty good in the first half of the year we struggled in... until we started imploding. But defense was always the biggest issue, but something that was improving as the year went on, quite substantially, and when Bradley returned we started dominating on that side of the floor too.
Don't discount that we were also relying on a rookie PF to be our center, and how his defense vastly improved through the year to the point that it looked dominant, that's something to look into as we go forward.
And then there's Bass... do we really need to get into this? A player that at times had to play center with Green at PF... who the heck thinks that's a good idea? Doc certainly did. Not only that his effort in the first half of the season was simply putrid.
In the end, last year's team had a lot of issues, and Rondo was really the least of it... and I've been very critical of him. But I think you remove the vets, particularly underpeforming ones, from his side, and I'm positive we'll see a different side of Rondo.
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Topic: How many wins does Rondo add to this team? (Read 2506 times)