Honestly, the incessant bashing, construing of information, and contradictory statements are so far past the point of revisionist history that I consider it an individual art form now.
Ya'll act like there wasn't a significant percentage of the fanbase telling you Rondo was overrated prior to the trade.
There's no revisionist history happening here... maybe a slight humbling of a fanbase who believed Rondo to be a superstar talent and had a bit of a reality check when they saw him dumped for a protected late 1st.
Rondo is a terrific player. I'll miss watching him. A lot of the complaints some of us had are now being echoed on a national level. Nothing being revised here it's just magnified by the last trickle of Rondo's relevance to this organization.
You saying that Rondo is a terrific player goes completely against everything you've ever said about the guy. I thought that he was a lazy, overrated role player with a bad attitude? You also won't miss watching him at all - you'll only miss having a chance to take a dump on him every day, and then in another thread you actually said that you wanted him to come back in the offseason!? Really, lol?
Actually Beat LA, there might be some fans here who thought Rondo was lazy and a bad attitude. That wasn't me, though.
He was my favorite player on the Celtics. He was definitely the best player on the Celtics. I think the first time I took the contrarian stance about Rondo was in a thread comparing him to Chris Paul. I said at the time that Rondo wasn't anywhere near the level of Chris Paul. Unpopular opinion at the time, because it's a Celtics blog, but I wasn't going to actively participate in group delusion for the sake of my fandom. I was the same way about Pierce... favorite player of the modern era, but if someone compared him to LeBron James, I was willing to point out how foolish that was. Likewise, a post on here in 2008 claiming Kendrick Perkins was a better fit for our team than "Hakeem in his prime"... I called that one out too.
That doesn't take anything away from how I felt about those guys. But come on...
I was always willing to point out Rondo's strengths and his flaws. Frankly, he's been pretty overrated. He was never the best player on the team during the KG/Pierce era. I felt like his playmaking ability was a little overstated. Quick summary, I felt like he got a ton of assists, because the ball needed to be in his hands. It needed to be in his hands because he was such a liability without the ball. So by necessity the ball had to flow through Rondo. On some teams it might work, but it limits the style of play a team can run. Makes the offense predictable. There's a reason why so few teams were willing to bring in Rondo... he's a player whose flaws you'd need to mask for him to be successful. There aren't a lot of teams that can utilize him in a way that he needs to be utilized. I would have been fine with us going out and getting stars that fit his style, but it always seemed like the most difficult path to take. He was approaching 30 and this team is still a few years away from even being mildly relevant. He had to go.
I'd almost forgotten about the Hakeem post, lol. However, I haven't once seen you bring up any of Rondo's strengths, and yet there you go again with how his playmaking ability is overrated.
You honestly never thought that he was the best player on the team during any time in the KG era? Not in the 2009 playoffs, where he owned Derrick Rose and practically averaged a triple double at 22? Not in 2010? Forget making the finals that year, we would never have beaten the Cavs if he didn't completely dominate that series. He tied records set by Cousy in that series, and that's just ridiculous. I wonder what Cousy thinks of this, btw, as he was always one of Rondo's biggest fans. Also, in the subsequent years, the reason why the Big Three were able to age as well as they did was because of Rondo. If he wasn't such a unique player, those guys would have still needed to try and do everything themselves, when it was clear that they could no longer do so for an entire game. What did Thibs say about him a month ago? You won't find a smarter or more creative player in the league. No one plays like him. As soon as he was traded, every point guard in the western conference went, "oh sh1t," lol. I'm sorry, but I've seen him do too many amazing things in the biggest moments of the biggest games to ever doubt him. Do I wish that he improved his free throw shooting? Of course. Do I wish that he was a better shooter? Yes - absolutely. For all of you who love Tony Parker, btw, there was a time when he was a terrible shooter, and it took a long time before he developed the shot that he has today. Part of the thing with Rondo's jumper is that he's kind of like DJ, who would intentionally miss during the regular season (I read that in a book somewhere where McHale actually said that DJ had told him that, so I'm not making it up.), but as soon as the playoffs rolled around, there he was, as usual, lol. I know that he didn't fit with the direction of the team, but that is in no way his fault, and, if we HAD to trade him, I would have required a much better return for a guy who's twice lead the league in assists. In fact, if the team was worse with Rondo than it is without him
, lol
, why wouldn't Ainge keep him to 1). drive up the value of guys like Green, Bass, Thornton, and Zeller, and 2). help us get a better draft pick, if you honestly believe that he was that bad, which is nothing more than pure hyperbole. I can't count the times you've called him completely overrated, and, honestly, after nearly constantly shopping him for practically his entire career, I think that he had a right to walk at the end of the year. We already have a ridiculous number of draft picks, anyway, Marcus Smart, who is suddenly the be-all and end-all around here, lol, and if Rondo leaves, wouldn't we have been better for it, record wise, so that we could have a better draft pick in 2016? It's certainly better than what we got from Dallas, lol.