There are different styles of basketball, just as there are different styles of music. Houston isolates nearly twice as often as any other team in the NBA. Golden State’s system yields 320-plus passes per game regardless of its talent level. Utah, Dallas and a few other teams rely heavily on their pick-and-roll game.
The Lakers have decided which style of basketball they’d like to play, tapping into the formula that’s worked for LeBron James throughout his NBA career. They run a handful of relatively simple offensive sets but mostly depend upon his prodigious talent to create and exploit advantages.
This approach is difficult to replicate when LeBron heads to the bench. Resolving that dilemma became more urgent with Saturday’s news
that nagging injuries may keep him out of action for an undetermined length of time.
Coach Frank Vogel usually asks Rajon Rondo to fill LeBron’s shoes in these situations. Talent discrepancies aside, LeBron and Rondo operate within the same basketball genre, so that decision is practical. Both players orchestrate the action while dominating the ball. At its best, it puts the development of a play in the hands of two of the Lakers’ most battle-tested shot creators. They come up with a concept based on the talent that they’re working with, then coordinate the group’s execution of it.
Rondo’s role as this alternate to LeBron makes sense within the context of the rest of the roster as well.
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None of the other guards on the roster can proficiently run an NBA offense. That’s never been in the job description for veterans like Danny Green, Avery Bradley, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Troy Daniels. Alex Caruso and Quinn Cook only have G-League and garbage time experience in that role. Their dribbling ability ranges from questionable to flat-out bad. Collectively, they’re the worst group of ball-handling guards in the NBA. They possess many useful skills, but running the show isn’t one of them.
Rondo provides a necessary attribute that the team is otherwise lacking, but he’s also battling the consequences of age and time.
The league has changed a lot since he entered the NBA in 2006. “Point guard” meant something different when he was developing as a basketball player. It was someone who controlled the action and set up his teammates but wasn’t relied upon to be one of a team’s primary scorers.
That’s who Rondo is, and as a rookie, he landed in the perfect spot with the Boston Celtics. He was flanked by All-Star scorers in Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce, and Rondo was a whizkid in a candy store. His inexperienced genius combined with their scoring prowess and veteran leadership to complete the rare feat of winning an NBA title with a rookie starting point guard.
He’s one of the last NBA players who was once tasked with running a contender’s offense while not being much of a scoring threat himself. The steady increase in defensive switching across the league is one of the reasons why his offensive approach is increasingly obsolete.
The Lakers run a Spain pick-and-roll on this play, but Rondo decides to reject the screen. Domantas Sabonis adjusts his defensive contain, and no advantage is created. This sort of miscalculation happens all the time in the NBA. It’s typically not a big deal, but in Rondo’s case, it is. More on that in a moment.
He’s sharing the floor with Caruso, Daniels, Green and Dwight Howard on this possession. It’s perfectly understandable if he decided that none of them could get their own shot, and he needed to create it. Vogel knows that the shot creation on the floor is weak, so he has them run a set play.
The first two options on this Spain pick-and-roll are Howard on the lob as he rolls to the basket or Green at the top of the key for an open 3-pointer. By rejecting the screen, Rondo has decided the flaw that he spotted in the defense — Sabonis cheating too early on his contain — was a better option than the original play call.
This is a low-percentage decision because Rondo doesn’t possess the necessary attributes to execute it successfully. The very nature of this play is that it’s a sneak attack. While everyone is expecting the Spain pick-and-roll to develop as it usually does, he tries to drive in the opposite direction in hopes of beating Sabonis to the rim.
That requires a level of quickness and finishing ability that a 33-year old Rondo doesn’t have. He’s shooting just 47.4 percent on shots between zero-to-three feet this season, a career low. Every other guard in the Lakers’ rotation makes at least 64 percent of their attempts at the rim.
Rondo’s gambit has failed at this point, and he now has to opt for Plan B without any help from the original play call. He’s still correct if he believes that none of the other guys on the court can create their own shots, so he decides to attack Sabonis himself. That begs the question: What tools does Rondo have to choose from while doing so?
He doesn’t have much of a step-back jumper, so using the threat of his minimal quickness advantage over Sabonis to create separation isn’t an option. He struggles to make pull-up elbow jumpers as well, so driving, planting his lead foot and rising up to use Sabonis’ weight and momentum against him won’t work either. If Rondo drives all the way to the basket, the aforementioned finishing issues come into play.
The lack of tools that Rondo has as a scorer makes his decision to attack in this manner all the more frustrating, considering what’s happening around him. Caruso, like Rondo, understands basketball language. When a ball-handler dribbles at you while you’re standing in the corner, that’s an automatic trigger that you need to cut to the basket. Caruso does that, but Rondo declines to make the pass. The passing window was narrow, and Caruso had congestion in front of him even if he received the pass. So it’s a justifiable decision by Rondo.
Howard, however, is open. As Caruso cuts through, Howard raises his hand and calls for the ball, right in front of the basket. Howard is, after all, on the other side of the switch that happened at the beginning of the play. He’s now being defended by Malcolm Brogdon, who he has pushed completely under the basket. Rondo doesn’t make that pass either, so Howard leaves the paint to avoid a three-second violation and is no longer open.
This is a missed read by Rondo.
Daniels relocates to the weak-side corner as Howard’s portion of the play is developing. Rondo has made this incredible baseline read several times throughout his career, but it’s absurd to expect that of him.
Rondo pulls back his dribble from the sideline and displaces Green on the wing. Caruso, who has relocated to the weak-side wing, sees this and looks to clear up congestion by running a split cut. Green half-heartedly uses the screen, while Caruso cuts hard to the rim and gets semi-open while front-cutting Jeremy Lamb.
The quality of the opportunities created by these specific actions is secondary to Rondo’s seeming disinterest in making those passes in the first place. He decides that attacking Sabonis is the best option here, despite not possessing the skills to execute that attack with regularity. Rondo is generating just 0.67 points per possession when attacking switches this season.
Rondo is neither skilled nor athletic at this point in his career. He’s out there because he can run the show and because he can create opportunities out of stagnation, which allows the Lakers to play the same way for 48 minutes. Plays like this one illustrate his diminished capacity to do that in a league that’s switching more than ever.
That’s why his incorrect decision to reject the ball screen at the beginning of the play is important, when it’s relatively insignificant if anyone else does that. His decision-making is all he’s got at this point, and the frequency with which he makes the wrong one belies his reputation as one of the game’s geniuses.
Despite Rondo’s questionable decision-making and lacking skill set, he still enhances the best parts of Anthony Davis’ offensive game. LeBron can sit on the bench while the Lakers still get the monstrous version of A.D. that tears down the basket on alley-oops, instead of the more hesitant one that’s trying to be the centerpiece of the offense. As much as the NBA has changed, the pass-first point guard and dominant finishing big man is still a timeless pairing. Davis has a True Shooting Percentage of 63.2 percent when Rondo is on the floor (and LeBron is off of it) compared to 59.0 percent in all other situations.
The Lakers get this benefit from Rondo for approximately 12 minutes per game. LeBron usually goes to the bench for the last four minutes of the first and third quarters, along with a brief, two-minute breather in the second and fourth quarters. There’s also a benefit to having Rondo handle the ball alongside LeBron for the first few minutes of the second and fourth quarters when Davis is on the bench. It allows LeBron a few minutes of gameplay without needing him to bear the entire shot-creation burden.
The Lakers need what Rondo provides; they just need someone who is better at it. This was most apparent during their showdown against the Milwaukee Bucks last Thursday.
The Bucks’ stellar rim protection isn’t just a function of their collective length as a team. They defend the paint as a matter of principle and are perfectly willing to sacrifice 3-point attempts in exchange for staking their claim on the three-to-five foot territory in front of the rim.
The Lakers run another Spain pick-and-roll here, but this time Rondo uses the screen and lets the play develop. Giannis Antetokounmpo hedges on Rondo but drops back and concedes the floater to deter a potential lob attempt to Davis. Donte DiVincenzo tags hard off of the weak-side wing as well, a common rotation for the Bucks because they usually devote additional resources to protecting the rim.
Rondo makes the lob pass anyway for one of his five turnovers against Milwaukee in just 18 minutes of action.
Once again, this is the wrong decision by Rondo. This play is not the result of declining athleticism or even a lack of skill. He simply makes the wrong choice and it’s one that indicates a lack of preparation. The correct read — the skip pass to KCP for an open 3 — should have been apparent not only by reading the weak-side wing (DiVincenzo) but as a result of their preparation for this game. Once again,
this is what Milwaukee does.
Rondo has a reputation as someone with a voracious appetite for high-level understanding of game tape. If so, why is he missing such a core tenet of what his opponent does? If his value is as a basketball savant, not only should mistakes like this rarely happen but he also should be finding advantages that are unseen by everyone else. Far too often, Rondo opts for the low-percentage play that looks very clever when it’s successful, rather than the one that is more likely to get the job done.
He makes mistakes like these on a fairly regular basis. The on-court value of his hoops IQ no longer exceeds his deficiencies on defense, as a shooter or as an individual scorer.
Any absence from LeBron would allow Rondo to get more minutes alongside Davis, and that will increase his value so long as that’s the case. But Rondo’s role in the playoffs — where LeBron will likely play 38-40 minutes — is murkier. Perhaps Playoff Rondo will show up, and he’ll make the right decision often enough when the lights are shining brightest to make his weaknesses worth it. That seems extraordinarily optimistic considering the depths of his deficiencies at this point in his career.
All of LeBron’s title teams played a similar style of basketball to how the Lakers are playing now. They also had two elite shot creators in Dwyane Wade and Kyrie Irving to alleviate LeBron’s responsibility and create advantages out of any resulting stagnation.
The Lakers have no chance at acquiring that caliber of player to fill their shot-creation void, and that’s OK. Their frontcourt is the foundation of their aspirations and has shown itself to be worthy of that role. But they need at least one player other than LeBron who can handle the ball and create consistent opportunities while being adequate on the defensive end.
That player is not currently on their roster.
