The Artist

http://www.celticsblog.com/2014/10/30/7085649/rajon-rondo-assist-artist




Rajon Rondo, assist artist
By wjsy on Oct 30 2014, 11:52a +




Jared Wickerham
John Coltrane. Charlie Parker. Rajon Rondo.



I don't get jazz, but I understand its appeal; the idea of a jazz quartet being able to simultaneously play in concert with each other while having room for each member to branch out and improvise sounds cool.  You get this steady beat and then these blasts of (what sounds to me like) unorganized noise and that's jazz.  I don't get.  I want to and maybe I'm a square, but jazz just sounds like music interrupted.

I guess what I'm saying is that I had my reservations with Rajon Rondo coming back.  Well, I was wrong.

On Monday, I wrote about how easily he would fit in, but I was still a little worried.  After watching the team play in the preseason, I fell in love with how the offense was clicking.  It had a rhythm and continuity that I didn't want to see break.  Jeff picked the perfect word in last night's recap: beautiful.  There's certainly something beautiful to how Brad Stevens' pace-and-space, read-and-react motion offense flows.  The ball moves freely between all five players without the pretenses of a franchise player needing to get his touches or a Big Three to share the spotlight.  But this was all without Rondo.

I make the jazz reference because that's how I think about Rondo sometimes.  So many of the genre's greatest musicians seem to be these quirky, esoteric geniuses that play to the downbeat of their own drum.  Charles Mingus once said that, "anyone can make the simple complicated.  Creativity is making the complicated simple."  Sounds a lot like #9, right?  I was excited that Rondo was coming back, but with the team humming through training camp, adding one of the game's best improvisers could have been a disaster.

I don't get jazz, but I like to think I get Rondo.  The beautiful irony with him playing on a team like this is like having Miles Davis playing with a symphony orchestra.  While the other four players move smoothly through their sets, Rondo has the freedom to pick and choose where and when to improvise.  Sometimes, it's something subtle, like changing tempo in a song.  Other times, it's more deliberate, a blaring trumpet solo over a piano playing chord progressions.





This seems like a simple play where Rondo is just making the next pass in the natural flow of the offense, but it's the little things that make Rondo special.  Rondo is working within the system but like a great jazz improviser, he'll throw in something on the downbeat and the defense moving in the wrong direction.  That over-the-head, over-accentuated pass fake puts Bojan Bogdanovic on his heels and gives Avery Bradley just enough room to hit that three.




Again, this looks like a simple pick-and-roll with Kelly Olynyk, but consider the distance that bounce pass has to go and the zip he has to put on it to fit in that window.  He hits that high note with ease.




Remember that pass fake that freed up Avery for a three and the one-skip bounce pass to Olynyk for a lay up?  Here, Rondo strings them together.  It's hoops opera.  Instead of the pass fake, he freezes Jarrett Jack with a hard dribble with his left hand and immediately finds Tyler Zeller at the rim.  Bup-bup-BAM.  Bup-bup-BAM.

These are just three of his twelve assists last night and he's going to be piling them up all season.  At the start of training camp, Stevens' talked about how he'd employ a read-and-react offense with the team, but I don't think he really considered Rondo being able to manipulate defenses like he does.

Under Doc Rivers, there wasn't as much freedom for Rondo to explore, but with Boston playing with a quicker, more deliberate pace, he's now painting on a bigger canvas.  The motion offense gives him more options to play with.  During one of the timeouts yesterday, Abby Chin reported that Brad Stevens told his players to have fun and enjoy playing in the system.  Last night was Rondo having fun again.  It may look like he's pounding the ball too much or his passes are too fancy, but this is the artist at work and at play.  This is jazz.  I think I can hear it now.




bob
MY NOTE:  On the Rondo-to-Kelly pass, you also have to consider not only the pace on the ball to get it through but that the ball came right up into a 7'ers hands without him having to bend down for it from a 6'1" player.  A lot of people can make the pass but having the ball come up like that is touch.

I'm glad he's finally getting jazz, more people should.  If this is what opens his mind I'm all for it.  Jazz is about doing the unexpected, and therefore somewhat unsettling to some people, because you have the internal metronome and voice that keeps you in touch with your fellow players and the melody without having to actually hear it out loud and that frees you to create.  That's what he's talking about in this article.



.

Good for Rajon.  This could finally be his opportunity to morph from somewhat of a curiosity factor to basketball greatness.  It seems as though those of us who were concerned about his ability to acclimate to Brad's system needn't have worried.  He seems to have acclimating behind in favor of thriving.

As far as I'm concerned, the most important duty of a good floor general is helping to make teammates better.  One need look no further than the pick and roll with Zeller for the perfect definition of that facet of the game.

Go Rondo, and go Celtics!

Sam

Bobh,
Thanks for the article.
I'd add also a couple passes to AB and Zeller that weren't converted into layups due to, IMO, rust and lack of chemistry (which will go away as season progresses) but if they did it would be things of beauty.

At some points during the game it seemed that BKN didn't know what to do with Rondo. I wonder how he fares against stronger teams?

AK