Sundays in the NBA serve as a capstone of sorts for the week that was. Things can be put into place for the week ahead and story-lines, though they don’t go away, can at least be reset depending on what happened. Rajon Rondo, with all the trade questions surrounding him and the Boston Celtics organization, made the kind of mark with his classic 18 points, 17 rebounds and 20 assists (that’s just fun to type) line in the Celtics’ herky-jerky overtime win over the Knicks that only leaves his tradability more unclear. It doesn’t seem likely that after a performance like Rondo’s yesterday interested teams would suddenly stop calling Boston’s front office, assuming there’s no way the Celts would trade one of the league’s best all-around game influencers, but it doesn’t mean Boston’s decision becomes any easier either.
Easy as it is to assume there’s little chance of the Celtics dealing Rondo now, shouldn’t the deals just get sweeter if some team really wants to land the point guard? Sure, Boston can play with the asking price after a game like that, but wouldn’t seeing Rondo do all he did yesterday (and it could have been crazier, by the way, with a few less missed bunnies around the basket) only make teams that coveted him before all the more interested in landing him somehow? Rondo was insane yesterday, but it’s what he know of him, that these types of games, although ridiculous to watch live as the entire stat line tallies higher and higher, are possible for him when he’s driven to control, to seemingly have all the puppet strings tied to the ever-important flow of a game twisting around his fingers, that must make front offices league-wide swoon with the thought of what he could do with what they’ve got.
That game, though he may never quite duplicate totals like those again, was not some one-time explosion of everything Rondo had to give on a basketball court. This being his fourth triple-double of the season already speaks to that, as do the memories we have of Rondo in postseason’s past, where his virtuoso consumption of entire box scores put him at first on par importance-wise with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen and shortly thereafter above and alone as Boston’s most crucial component to maximizing whatever the Celtics, as they’re currently constructed, have left to achieve as a team.
The trade talks swirling around the league have certainly seemed to motivate Rondo to prove to someone — the Celtics or those interested around the league or both — that whatever is going to be done with him is going to be a big deal. Rondo said as much in his post-game interview, inviting more trade discussions for fuel and further, casually saying he “was trying to do everything at once” on the floor.
For many players, especially point guards, attempting to do too much can throw an entire team out of whack; for Rondo, going for everything at once, and the knowledge — bolded, underlined and highlighted with yesterday’s line — that in some ways he can achieve that on the court, is all he can do to make the impending decisions that will come before the trade deadline as difficult as possible for potential suitors and the Celtics.
Griffin Gotta contributes to The Hoop Doctors and is a co-managing editor of Straight Outta Vancouver. The story arcs and infinite weirdness of the NBA are addictions he deals with every day. Email him at griffingotta at gmail dot com.
