Absolutely. He didn't pound the ball at the 3pt line like he's accused by some of here, and he made jumper after jumper. He also passed very well, as he usually does. The offense flowed well, and he helped his teammates (Bradley, Bass) get into great rhythm.
19/10/6 in ONLY 26 minutes with probably not even 75% of his speed back yet. He's definitely on his way back.
We only accuse him of it because he does it a lot.
I guess we'll find out whether he did that because he insisted on running the offense like that (as his accusers frequently claimed last year) or because of the coaching/personnel from the last few years.
Only if we ignore that Rondo himself became aware of the issue and seems to have addressed it on his time off, particularly after our good play when he went down... there was a lot of "Rondo's perspective on how to run the offense has been changing" type of stories dating back to late last season or so. Whether those stories are BS or not, well that's another thing.
So whether we stay the same or see noticeable change we'll never know exactly what the root of the problem is/was.
I think you'd have to be of the opinion that we ran the offense that Rondo wanted and not what Doc wanted, and that our being in a half court game much of the time was because Rondo didn't like to play in transition and not because we had KG and PP out there. I think that's all fairly unlikely, but we'll never be able to disprove the "Rondo ran the team and not Doc or the big three" theories.
The only real proof we have was that last year the ball-movement was much better when Rondo wasn't on the floor, that said I accused Pierce too as being part of the problem. And when Doc decided to use Bradley as the PG, instead of the by committee thing he had going early on or PG-less if you will, the ball-movement also regressed once again, in part because Bradley sucks as a PG.
The ball movement was good for a small stretch after Rondo went out, coincidentally during a stretch where most of the teams we played were poor defenses. It also took the rest of the league a little while to adjust to the fact that we radically changed our offense in mid-season, which rarely happens in the nba. After that the "improved ball movement" was pretty much players swinging the ball around the perimeter, nothing that was breaking down defenses or anything.
Other than there have been an absurd amount of instances in which you could see Doc calling for the PG to push the ball, and Rondo kept walking the ball up. And yes, Rondo was pretty much in charge of play calling, so it ultimately falls to him to move the ball with the responsibilities he had been handed. But who cares at this point, it is what it is, I have moved on from playing the blame game.
Also, before Rondo went down, our bench was running quite well and the ball movement was there, so we also had a fairly good indication that the roster as constructed was moving the ball better without Rondo, and that should have never been the case, particularly with a pass first PG like Rondo. This wasn't always Rondo's MO, he used to play a lot more off the ball (though he wasn't that good off the ball at that time). I've always argued that Rondo, with his renewed ability to hit the open jumper, would've been a great asset off the ball. Why it wasn't in the gameplan after Rondo established himself in the league, I will never know.
And as mentioned, you're talking about ineffective ball-movement later in the season, when that holds no relevance to me...ball movement is ball movement, we can argue about the effectiveness of it at some later junction. That said, what I saw more than anything was a decrease in ball-movement as time went on, which directly correlates when Doc seemed to give Bradley more control of PG duties than he had previously. We've seen the result of the same this season.
Initially, what we were seeing a lot of was our team grabbing a defensive rebound and everyone running down the floor and a lot of passing forward, after a while what we started seeing was Bradley running back towards the ball, instead of running to our basket, and the rest was history because our half-court offense wasn't as effective.
In the end, I've seen Rondo destroy teams by pushing the ball all by his lonesome if needed be. Some games against the Knicks come to mind, and some in the playoffs in particular against Chicago. I've always hated the idea that a PG doesn't push the ball because the rest of the team isn't running... I'm of the camp that it should be up to the PG to push the ball, and the rest to catch up if the can. You're a PG for a reason, set the tempo.
