But his assist to TO ratio was worse.
Probably at least partially reflective of the poor shooting of his teammates. Consider that Rondo has been on the floor a ton of minutes with Bass, Pierce & Terry (plus a still-getting-back-into-it Avery Bradley) during their prolonged shooting slumps.
This has almost certainly left many a potential assist as just that. Potential.
The number of assists didn't go down. The number of TOs went up.
That's not missed shots.
Well, that's why I qualified it with 'partly'.
His TO's per 40 minutes went up from 4.0 last year to 4.2 this year.
His Assists dropped from 12.7 down to 11.8. A drop of 0.9 assists per 40 minutes.
Where did it go?
Well, as others have mentioned, he has been taking more shots: His FGA went up from 11.7 up to 13.1 - an increase of 1.4.
The ratio of TOs to the total of Assists+FGA went from .164 last year to .169 this year. Hardly a dramatic shift.
I don't know off hand (though others do track this) how many 'assist attempts' he had that did not result in a made shot (solely because the shot missed). It is only logical that it had a small up-tick, though, given the higher miss rates (i.e. lower FG%) that his floor mates had compared to prior seasons.
If we included the number of 'assist attempts' in the denominator of the ratio, I suspect the ratio has hardly changed at all, or possibly gone down.