What's notable about that video is the complete lack of disrespect the Miami defense is giving Rondo. Look at the space... they aren't even near him. Half his shots are completely uncontested jumpers. They are literally daring him to shoot the ball. It's how you defend a center when he's behind the 3 point line. "Go ahead big man... shoot... I dare ya". It's a byproduct of Rondo sharing the floor with 3 4 dangerous offensive weapons. Ray Allen, the greatest 3-point threat alive. Pierce, the greatest pure scorer in Celtic history. Kevin Garnett, a nasty mid-range shooter. And lastly, Brandon Bass... a player we traded for exclusively because of his reliable and dangerous mid-range shooting game. Bass and KG draw the bigs out of the paint. Pierce and Ray can't be left alone. So essentially Miami is making a conscious decision in this game to slack off Rondo and let him shoot. They also are trying (ineffectively, but that's due to a lack of rim protector) to prevent drive-and-kicks.
So they are basically daring Rondo to shoot. Ultimately, it's a smart plan. Rondo is a poor shooter. Sure, once in a lifetime he'll drop 44 points, but it's a risk worth taking.
Miami won the game.
It's actually not a new approach. In the 80s I remember Boston making a conscious decision to let Jordan score and stop everyone else. Jordan went off for 63 points, but Boston won the game. Actually, we kind of did the same thing with LeBron back in his early years with the Cavs before he developed a dangerous outside game. Let LeBron do his thing just stop everyone else. Not so coincidentally, Miami let Jeff Green go off in a regular season game a year later... Miami won both games.
Anyways... if Rondo could score consistently like this, he wouldn't have been left open like that. Right now in the post KG/Pierce/Ray/Doc world he's got shooting splits of 28%/23%/50%. That's really not someone you need to worry about on the offensive end. Miami decided that night they were going to let Boston live and die with Rondo. It was a successful strategy for them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I-meNeNB6oIn watching this video of all of Rondo's points and assists in that Miami series, the thing that jumps out at me is that after that huge performance in game two, the Heat started playing Rondo differently. Instead of almost exclusively going under picks and daring him to take that perimeter shot, they started fighting over the pick much more and bringing a big up to "show" against Rondo in the pick and roll game.
Rondo hitting those jump shots early in the series was a major factor in the Celtics playing so well in those middle three games and being able to take the Heat to seven. It opened up a lot of opportunities for the team, and helped keep Miami's defense on their toes.
If you think back to last year's finals, one of the reasons that the Spurs were able to make that series so competitive (it still hurts for me that they blew a series that they had in the bag) was because they successfully employed the dare-Lebron-to-shoot-from-the-perimeter strategy for most of the series. If James had been knocking down the mid-range jumper with consistency throughout that series, the Spurs would eventually have had to back of that strategy and it probably wouldn't have been as close as it was.
I guess my overall point is that no one is completely unguardable, not even the best player in the game. Good defensive teams look for strategies to try to eliminate the effectiveness of the best players on the opposing teams. Sometimes good defensive teams find successful game plans to stop (or at least minimize the effect of) great players.
I know it's easy to think that every single teenage basketball player with a youtube video is some day going to be a flawless basketball player when he enters the NBA, and all we have to do is strip everything down and put ourselves in a position for one of those guys, and it's an automatic return to NBA dominance. It's easy to glorify a young player's skills when he still has tons of
potential. And, it's equally easy to put the flaws of proven NBA veterans under a microscope and rip apart the games of everyone not named Lebron James or Kevin Durant.
To me, the above line of thinking by so many NBA fans and those who cover the game for a living is a big part of what's wrong with our league. Everyone is always looking for the next great thing while being perfectly willing to throw away excellent players in that search. Generally, all those young players with worlds of potential end up proving to have some flaws when they mature into pros, just like everybody else.
Topic: How many can't wait to see this version of Rondo? (Read 7753 times)