This is what should have happened when Wade took down Rondo. I guess the little guy is the only one who will stick up for his mates.
For those of you who are already typing a response about being smart and not letting emotion get the best of you in the playoffs: can you remind me who one that series again?
This is the part of the story that bothers me the most, and something Doc nailed after the game. It was really dumb of Rondo to put himself in jeopardy like this...but what is even worse is that he needed to. That game was getting rough, and the C's were getting outhustled, outworked, and out-toughed.
Rondo took it on himself to stand up to the Nets, and he cost the team for it. But what should have happened is some of the role players should have been the ones that did that. Jason Collins, Chris Wilcox, Brandon Bass, Jared Sullinger, Jeff Green, Courtney Lee, Jason Terry, etc. They are the ones who are supposed to be sacrificing themselves to light a fire under the team, and show that they aren't going to be pushed around.
While Rondo needs to be smarter, this team is not going to be able to do any damage against the better teams in the league, until they start getting some toughness out of the other guys.
This team needs to play tougher, hands down. Nets were playing tougher, they pushed us further and further from the basket and got the upper hand.
But we cannot consistently rely on ejections to start playing tougher and even last night, after the incident happened, we didn't play much better defense for at least another full quarter.
What I expect from a team leader is get vocal during timeouts or even the small breaks during a free-throw shooting to get the team's act together. That's what KG and PP do. Intensity is a good thing up to the point that it begins to hurt your own.
As aggressive as KG is, he is certainly controlling himself to a degree, because if he let it all out, that wouldn't be firing up your teammates any more. What Rondo needs to do is to adopt a similar manner.
I want him to be a leader that has consciously tough.
Not Ron Artest-tough.
Oh, I agree completely. But what my point was, Rondo would never have even considered doing that, if the rest of the team was playing tougher overall.
I get your point.
I also agree that, well before that play, he was frustrated with the basketball Celtics were playing. A stagnant offense with just the player with the ball moving around and a next-to-nothing defensive toughness.
And as some fellow bloggers point out, I didn't expect this would turn into a calamity with multiple players involved at the beginning.
I'm not blaming him, but I stil don't get how Kris Humphries was pushed back so easily. Maybe he didn't expect Rondo's initial reaction, I don't know.
At any rate, an incident which initially looked like a potential double technical called in the end, got quickly out of hands and ended with ejections.
That said, I'm not suggesting this altercation was anywhere near "Artest-dirty".
I just don't want an evolution in that direction and probably a one game suspension or maybe two, would help him refrain from initiating these kind of incidents the next time.