Let me just say that all I've wanted Rondo to do individually he did last night, so I'll give him praise for that, he was aggressive with is game and shot the ball when the shot became available, no hesitation.
But his flaws in running the offense, which have been one of my main problems with him, showed up last night.
What I mean by this, is that first he really doesn't time passes well for one, and many times he's inaccurate. Earlier in the season, during our big winning streak, these were two things he was improving upon, and it mainly showed up with the two-men dynamic between himself and Ray... which in turn made Ray Allen successful. As Ray himself put it, his success this year his tied with Rondo's play. And last night Rondo was quite bad in this department, since early in the game he was missing Ray coming off screens, and when he did give him the ball it was late or not passed to the right spot. Though, I'll also say that Ray was quite bad last night, but as a rhythm shooter I can't just discount the effect that Rondo's play has on it. If we're going to give Rondo credit when Ray is having a great night because of his passing, it stands to reason that Rondo also should share some of the blame when Ray struggles and Rondo is doing a bad job moving the ball.
The play that really got to me was in the second half, we were on a fastbreak and Ray was in position to have a rhythm transition three, which is money for him and I thought there was a good chance that with that play he could break out of his funk. But what happened? Rondo didn't trust his future hall-of-famer shooting guard, and kept the ball looking for other options that weren't there, with two men keeping him from the basket (when Ray would've completely wide open)... after a few seconds of hesitation, he finally delivers Ray the ball... but he is no longer in rhythm and I think his shot was contested, and he delivered a brick. Would he have made the shot had Rondo given him the ball as he should? Who knows, but you don't deny him the ball in that situation regardless.
Secondly, he does a poor job penetrating in order to draw defenders towards himself and then find the open man. This should be his next thing in line to develop, that penetrating doesn't always have to be about him getting to the basket, and to learn to pentrate in a slower speed. What it's ocurring now is that he penetrates and he's forcing shots, instead of threatening just enough to open things up. This is one thing that Rose did quite well last night, which lead to some really good passes to either Thomas and Noah.
Thirdly, which is one that frustrates me the most is that he stands around dribbling the ball, and does nothing else waiting for someone (often Ray) to make himself available. To me that's just unacceptable because by the time he makes that first pass, we're often down to the 10-15 second mark of the shotclock. What he should be doing is while Ray is running through screens and stuff, Rondo should be looking at the other options on the floor, while at the same time keeping Rose on his toes by threatening to penetrate... this way you don't waste 10-14 seconds doing nothing, just to pass it off to Ray with no shot. He needs to learn how to play within the meat of the defense, causing havoc while other parts of the offensive system develop. I really don't know if this is simply a poor offensive system that has him doing that, or if it's simply Rondo's inexperience with him having tunnel vision.
And fourth, poor ball movement, which has to start with Rondo (and it's quite related to my 3rd point). Rondo held on to the ball the whole night, just to have 7 assists from a poor total of 16 from our team. But this topic has been addressed many times in this thread already.
Now this is not Rondo related, but man it really annoys me how little off the ball movement we have. Don't really know who the blame for this goes, if it's poor execution or a bad offensive system. Ray is about the only one that gets some off the ball movement. The rest just stand around waiting for something to happen.
Now, there were many other problems (like Baby, that even though he was having a good game overall, his basketball IQ didn't show up and it cost us at times), but these are the main things I think we should clean up. And overall, I thought Rondo had a great game, and I hate to criticize him much for yesterday, but if he did some of the things I mention here, we would've been better off. And he's running our offense, and with that a lot of the responsibility falls on him regardless of how well he plays individually.
With all of this said, we played a very very bad game, and Chicago played it's absolute best... and we were one freethrow away from winning it. Not at all worried at the moment. Chicago will be done in no time.
