He Saw It All

Tsar Gerard was working it out follicly when Rondo went down. He’d had death in the morning, but now it was time to relax. It was a Sunday in Riverdale, and I was a college student trying to get a decent haircut at a fair price. The Celtics-Heat matinee game was on the smallest digital television I had ever encountered to that point.

After my lettuce had been tended to, I stimmed in the presence of Jerry. “Ayo, you see this?” he said, mid-haircut, and I was already doubled over trying to figure out where the Boston Celtics would turn. Rajon Rondo’s injury looked bad – it ended up being a torn ACL that changed the trajectory of his career . When that announcement arrived, it felt like the end of those Celtics, even before the Worst Trade Ever (ft. the Brooklyn Nets). 

Fear not: Rondo played for another decade in the NBA before finally, officially announcing his retirement this week on the “All The Smoke” podcast. One of the greatest basketball minds ever has, at the end, admitted he is tired. Thinking through that much would wear anyone out.

Let’s start here: Rondo is maybe the best passer of a basketball that the game has seen – when your counterpoints are LeBron, Magic and Nash, you’re doing well. Regardless of his teammates, as he would prove in stints with the Sacramento Kings, Chicago Bulls, New Orleans Pelicans and elsewhere, this is a player who could organize things. He had the vision.

I bristle a bit at the phrase “floor general.” It invokes way too much of the military industrial et cetera that runs right up against the idea that the people we inevitably watch are playing a kid’s game, and many of the people running youth leagues only have the military to look to, and the chasm between those thoughts, and who expresses them publicly or otherwise, runs me ragged. Are we soldiers, or are we children? In this construction, the lines blur.

Imagine (tough thing to do, given AI can do it really poorly for you) someone who can see the game you’re playing three to five steps ahead. Imagine, still, that you land where you need to: he’s four plays ahead, but if you can scurry to the corner and/or set a key screen, he’ll work the rest out.

Rondo was a Tubby Smith product from one of the better UK teams that he fielded between winning a national title in 1998 and, hmpf, anything that happened until his dismissal in 2007, the year after the then-moribund Celtics drafted Rondo 21st overall. They saw a raw magician, someone who could feed Paul Pierce his morsels while orchestrating the rest of the offense. A year later, they would surround him with certainty in the forms of Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen.

Insofar as they exist anymore, Rajon Rondo was a floor general. Having five players that can do everything capably is the current dream – with Victor Wembanyama, and others, the FreeDarko ideal of positionless basketball is upon us – but having a player who can lead without necessarily being the best player on the floor is an idea that’s fading.

Basketball fans have had more than their fair share of 2008 Celtics lore thrown at them, but the fact is that somebody needed not to be shooting. We hear a lot from Kendrick Perkins, who fit that bill in a different way, but Rondo was the one who unlocked everybody else on that team. That became apparent as the rest of the team aged, and he progressed into his prime.

Rondo was the one who said “You know what?” and then executed a daring pass through three defenders to a somehow-open person lurking in the paint that he made look rudimentary. His 44-point game against an all-time great Heat team in 2012 was the iceberg commeth: though he never reached that height again, knowing it was possible was enough to tune in.

I don’t know how to convey how laughably insane some of the passes Rondo made during his prime were other than to say, really, that they were laughably insane. He made reads so many steps ahead of the defense that he may as well have already been on defense himself, two or three possessions ahead of what he was doing. Many more times than once, he took my breath away with a pass that you couldn’t comfortably analyze in a film session. Playoff Rondo was a thing, however briefly; some strands of this school of thought extend to Playoff Jimmy Butler, or Playoff Himmy, if you are so inclined.

At 26, with the ACL injury, his career was all but finished. The Celtics hung onto him for another season, but with the KG-Pierce trade to the Nets in the summer of 2013, they knew it was over. One would assume Rondo did, too. It ended up opening the door for the current Jaylen Brown-Jayson Tatum Celtics, to be sure, but before his injury, Rondo was the one meant to usher one of the league’s premier teams into its next era.

He spent some time in Dallas with autumnal versions of Dirk Nowitzki and Monta Ellis. He landed in Sacramento for a spell, winning an assist crown while serving the remains of DeMarcus Cousins and what was left of Jason Thompson. He was a presumptive Alpha with the Chicago Bulls during that ill-fated period (any Bulls period sans-Mike is ill-fated), kicked over to an underrated New Orleans Pelicans team that reunited him with first-team ALL DEFENSE Tony Allen and then embarked on his Chinatown period.

A brief stint in Atlanta aside, Rondo rode out the rest of his time in Los Angeles. He’d win another championship in 2020 with the Bubble Lakers team, which should’ve bookmarked his career; you’re likely familiar with the photo of him and his young, self-titled son relaxing in confetti.

Even in that photo, Rondo looks unfulfilled. His visage invokes Nick Saban winning a national championship and being mad about it because he’d lost two weeks in recruiting. Rondo was always thinking.

In the midst of that, Rondo managed to (holding my breath before diving in headfirst) change the game in a particular way. He perfected the Steve Nash-style run under the rim in order to invert the offensive set, and no one was better at passing out of a drawn double team than he until LeBron himself adjusted to that. 

This might lose the plot a bit, but: there’s a thread that connects Robertson, Pete, Magic, Stockton, Kidd, Nash, LeBron, Draymond, Jokić and Luka, and Rajon Rondo is somewhere along that line. There are no-look passes and volleyball-style taps that we now take for granted, but Rondo was doing that with 20 seconds left on the shot clock in the middle of an early December game against nobody in particular.

The plight that affects LeBron also got to Rondo: Everybody that played with him talks about how smart he was. It’s a disease to think that five LeBrons, or five Rondos, working together would be a championship team no matter the externalities. Even so, the idea is enticing. Rajon Rondo is, at worst, the third-greatest basketball mind I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes. He knew where you needed to be. Do you?