Next Steps

“He is the most under-appreciated leader in this league,” says one former teammate.

His coach has insisted for several years that this is his team. His general manager tried to trade him several times in recent years, but is now wiser for having held on to a franchise point guard.

Rajon Rondo is not built like the other dominant point guards you know, both in demeanor and style of play. Once the young player on a veteran team, ostracized and labelled as an enigma, Rondo’s gone from being a complimentary piece on a championship team to the focal point of the team.

He is the franchise, the one expected to bridge the gap between fading expectations of the present and the prosperity of the future.

This duality, a sort of compounding responsibility, is probably best shouldered by Rondo, who can frustrate and tantalize with his play on the court — sometimes the court seems as though it’s entirely his, the maestro who dictates the pace of the game, other times you wonder if he possesses all the skills to be the take charge player in crunch time that the Celtics increasingly need him to be. As much as the positives perpetuate this seemingly limitless potential to his game, the visions of him taking the reigns as the point guard who can influence the game most also accentuates the negatives.

Not too different from how their team is reflected in our minds: with a core of proud veterans still just several years removed from being champions, meanwhile ushering in a separate group that Rondo seems destined to lead.

Where he was once a luxury to a team with few holes in their quest to be the last team standing, it’s now become a necessity, a requirement that Rondo be the player that he can be. He is their harbinger of hope, the one who makes it realistic to consider the Celtics in the championship conversation. They’re not the ones who knock anymore, but you still have to account for the possibility that they might.

The support of players and management in the off-season of the reported rift between himself and Ray Allen spoke volumes about how his peers, the ones closest to him feel about him. How they assess his value and appreciate what he brings to the table.

In return, Rondo is rewarding them with a transformation from soft-spoken recluse to a leader of men.

In the off-season, he organized workouts for the team in Los Angeles, arranged to have flag football games, and even tried to talk the Celtics’ owners to allow the players to use their private planes for the team gatherings. When league rules prevented that from happening, the players paid for everything themselves.

You listen to teammates and coaches talk about him now, and you realize that his growth has been happening long before it was publicized. And that’s the way Rondo prefers it: “I don’t care. I don’t need the attention. I didn’t feel the need to go out and say, ‘I’m the leader here.’ I did my stuff behind closed doors.”

But his unique ability and imagination is all in the open for us to appreciate on the court. Sometimes you wonder if he’s finding space, or creating it all by himself.

People like to throw around terms like basketball genius, a feel for the game, a high IQ; all hyperbole reserved for only the best is embodied in Rondo’s play.

In a league that’s searched forever for a replacement for superstars of eras gone by, it’s no longer important to find the next Jordan, to place someone on pedestal as we did Magic and Bird, or Chamberlain and Russell before that. It’s players who define themselves and create a prototype worthy of future comparisons — players like Rondo — the true originals of this new era, that will matter long after the league’s moved onto the next generation.

In the Eastern Conference Finals last year, few expected the Celtics to compete, let alone have two chances to eliminate Miami. LeBron obliterated any repeat narratives of a collapse with an individual performance for the ages in Game 6. The deciding game went according to script, Miami fended off their rivals and returned to the Finals.

But in the fourth quarter, when the game hung in the balance, all I could think of — that I believed — was that Rondo would be the one to cement his reputation as a big-game player, that he was going to swing the series in Boston’s favor one last time.

It never came to be. But I doubt it will be the last chance he gets in his career to make that statement. This is his team now, and there’s no question that the transition from reluctant talent to true superstar is already in progress for the next great point guard in the making.

Posted on 24 October, 2012

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