Rajon Rondo is a man without a country.
One day, you turn around, and all of a sudden it’s been seven long years since that immortal Celtics title run. And it’s been two years since he went down with an ACL injury that drastically altered his career trajectory and helped spur the dissolution of the Big 3 era in Boston.
We all know how his stint in Dallas turned out. It’s pointless to rehash it here. But it can’t be emphasized enough that it’s a cold, cold world out there for an embattled star whose deficiencies – all of them – have never been more magnified than they are now. Even if you set aside his prickly personality, he’s still a modern-day Rip Van Winkle who woke up one morning in the deep thicket of the modern NBA where the emphasis on spacing, ball movement, and shooting has threatened to render him obsolete. The ball-dominant point guard who couldn’t hit sand if he fell off a camel is quite simply a dying breed.
And the notion that Rondo might suddenly be willing or able to revolutionize his playing style to fit within a certain system was categorically dispelled in Dallas. The old cliche “he’s playing chess out there while everybody else is playing checkers” never applied to Rondo because he was always playing Connect Four. That’s just how Rondo is. So anybody ballsy enough to give the Rondo experiment another go will have to live with all the variables and volatility that come with it.
The Los Angeles Lakers, who previously seemed intent on acquiring Rondo this off-season, have apparently cooled on that idea, and it would be naive to think that his Dallas miniseries hasn’t played a big part in that. It doesn’t matter whether fellow a**hole Kobe Bryant wants him on the team or not. Kevin Ding over at Bleacher Report has more on the Lakers’ brass and their ever-evolving mindset on the topic:
“But what should be made clear, according to team sources, is that Buss is not the believer he was earlier in the season when it comes to Rondo, and Kupchak is toting enough healthy skepticism that he sees Rondo as value only at a certain low price.”
The word “mercurial” gets overused a lot when describing Rondo’s temperament. That’s because, at this point, is it really that surprising or unpredictable? Don’t you know exactly what you’re signing up for, i.e. a moody point guard who likes to do things his way and sometimes gets under his coach’s and teammates’ skin?
The only question is whether we’ll ever again see that transcendent player who was once capable of putting up ridiculous triple doubles on basketball’s biggest stage while simultaneously shining brighter than the three future Hall-of-Famers surrounding him. That’s a risk a lot of folks around the league still might be willing to take, and it’s why Rondo will inevitably land somewhere next season. The Lakers will have to decide whether they can afford to take that risk, financially and otherwise, in what could potentially be Kobe’s swan song.
