Well I can agree that Rondo is ruining it for this Celtic fan. One of these days I will seriously hurt myself rolling my eyes in some of these Rondo threads. Honestly Rondo has his flaws which we've all discussed ad nauseum and can recite in our sleep. Knowing this I don't know why we want him to be some cray Russell/Cousy/Bird hybrid and get annoyed when he isn't.
Yesterday we lost for a lot of reasons and I wouldn't put Rondo on the top of that list. Our depth is so thin right now. And a couple of guys in the rotation need surgery. We've needed Herculean efforts from one of Pierce, KG or Rondo for most of our postseason wins. In this series, we'll need at least two maybe even all three of them to have big games to win. We have very little margin for error and yesterday too many things went wrong.
TP. Rondo can't be everything everyone wants him to be. He is what he is: a moody, inconsistent, high IQ, streaky player who, despite his inconsistency, still brings a lot more to the table than he takes away.
I think if you watched any player with the preconceived notion that they're inconsistent and look for inconsistent play, you'll find it. LeBron scored 13 in the first and the Heat pulled ahead, he scored 4 in the second and the Celts came back. Wade scored 6 in the first half and 16 in the second half. When Rondo does that people call it wild inconsistency. When the rest of the stars in the league do it it generally goes unnoticed.
That is a great point.
No player's stats are evenly distributed throughout their playing time. A single game is not a large enough sample for an even distribution, so the data will be clumpy during a single game. In fact, it is typically pretty clumpy over a few games, with a much high variance in stats per game than from season to season.
If people already have a narrative in mind for a player, confirmation bias comes into play where you seek out confirming data or interpret data as confirming a preconception.
I think Rondo's demeanor though is demonstrably unimpressive at at many points. He reminds me of Beltran, who looks like he is coasting even when he isn't. Rondo may also be a less reliable scorer than typical starters due to being a poor shooter.