The Chicago Bulls point guard Rajon Rondo is the only N.B.A. player I can think of with a nickname that can only be used for two months a year. That sometime moniker, “Playoff Rondo,” points to his propensity for saving his best performances for this biggest and most visible stage. It’s a bit like Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October,” except that while Jackson’s seasonal sobriquet had purely positive connotations, indicating his ability to accomplish incredible feats when they mattered most, Rondo’s tag is meant, partly, to suggest that maybe he’s dogging it a bit the rest of the time. It’s hard to tell whether he simply plays harder for the national-TV cameras or if, for him, it’s somehow easier to be fully present when the stakes are clear and close at hand.
This year’s dispensation, we learned on Friday morning, may have been even briefer than usual: the Bulls announced that, during his excellent Tuesday-night game against the Boston Celtics, Rondo fractured his right thumb and will sit out “indefinitely.” This was a blow. As the Bulls have sprinted to an unexpected 2–0 lead against Rondo’s former team, the top-seeded Boston Celtics—in a first-round series whose proceedings have been sadly overcast since the day before the opener, when the star Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas’s sister died, at just twenty-two, in a tragic car accident—it’s been refreshing to see “Playoff Rondo” again.
The standard narrative about Rondo’s decline as a player is that, as he’s aged, his weaknesses—a janky, hesitant outside shot, and an interest in perimeter defense that is, at best, occasional—have grown steadily more glaring, and placed him increasingly out of step in a league in which defense and long-range shooting are commodities more precious than ever before. His pass-first, pace-controlling game makes him an obvious ancestor of an older generation of point guards, like Gary Payton and Jason Kidd, but also leaves him without a place within contemporary N.B.A. offenses. He’s also, pretty plainly, a pill. When he played fourth wheel to Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen on the last great Celtics team, he often seemed to drive his older teammates, as well as their coach, Doc Rivers, to distraction. When Boston traded Rondo to the Dallas Mavericks, he spent an ill-fated half-season feuding openly—sometimes on the sidelines, in direct view of the TV cameras—with the universally respected coach Rick Carlisle, who finally benched Rondo during the playoffs. Then Rondo signed a one-year deal with the Sacramento Kings—as close to an Outer Darkness as the N.B.A. has to offer. While there, he directed a profane, homophobic outburst toward the referee Bill Kennedy, who, during the round of media recriminations that followed, came out as gay, the first N.B.A. official to do so. Just this year, midway through a largely uninspiring, slow-footed season, Rondo, in an oddly long Instagram caption, chastened his two All-Star teammates, Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade, for their public criticisms of the rest of the team.
And still, when, for whatever complex set of physical and probably psychological reasons, he manages to resemble the version of himself that helped and sometimes led those old Celtics groups to two Finals appearances and a championship, he is mesmerizing to watch. On Tuesday, his intelligence was palpable whenever he was on the floor, especially on defense: on more than one occasion, he seemed to anticipate, several passes in advance, the movement of the Celtics’s offense, and then slip cavalierly into a passing lane, accepting the ensuing steal like a gift. On offense, he saw everything: once, standing near the foul line with his back to the basket, he tossed the ball over his shoulder and into the hands of an airborne Butler. At another point, he leaped to collect a rebound, then threw a football pass downcourt, again to Butler, who made an acrobatic catch and notched an easy layup.
Personality-wise, Rondo was equally present—and this, perhaps, is how he can continue to help his team, even if Tuesday’s game was his last of the playoffs. Late in the game, the Celtics guard Avery Bradley overheard Rondo saying that the Celtics had “given up.” During a time-out, he stood talking animatedly and endlessly to Butler, pointing here and there on the floor, while Butler nodded and avoided eye contact. Whatever he was saying, it was worth the annoyance: by the end of the evening, Rondo had tallied a perfectly Rondovian box score—eleven points, nine rebounds, fourteen assists—and the Bulls had won again.
Draymond Green, the Golden State Warriors’ do-everything forward, has always reminded me of Rondo, and he might be a sad hoops fan’s best compensation for the latter’s early exit. At his best—and also, for that matter, at his worst—Green’s presence is felt across the entire court, and his box scores are correspondingly full. Like Rondo, he is a gifted passer, with a rare ability to wordlessly nudge his teammates onto advantageous spots on the floor. He, too, has an often spiky, never-retreating personal style. (Videos of his intense interactions with Kevin Durant have come to form something of a mini-genre.) It is possible that, by way of an unforgettable shot to LeBron James’s groin, Green cost his team last year’s title. And so there is a strain of personal redemption in his brilliant postseason play so far this year.
Green often acts as a “point forward” for the Warriors, bringing the ball downcourt and gesturing his teammates into motion; during the playoffs, this has become his semi-permanent role. During Wednesday night’s 110–81 blowout win, against the Portland Trail Blazers, he doled out assist after assist, including an offhandedly beautiful alley-oop to his seven-foot teammate JaVale McGee—who had his own energetic first half, all dunks, tip-ins, and soaring blocks. The sharpshooting guard Klay Thompson looked good early, and Green made sure, several times, to draw the defense into the paint and then send the ball to Klay with room to let it fly. When Green hit his own three from the corner, it was almost an afterthought.
Green is a terror on defense—he had three blocks on Wednesday, including a chase-down swat that followed a full-court sprint—but he is also one of basketball’s most intuitive and diverting offensive players. Everything he does on that end of the floor has a reckless edge. At one point, he set an obviously illegal screen, then, predictably, feigned bewilderment when the referee called a foul. Green attracts technical fouls in bouquets, but this time, a teammate pulled him away. Like Rondo—the two are twins, really, identical in their difficulty and their rough, sometimes off-putting love of the game they play—he was utterly himself.
