Rajon Rondo done for the season: Where do the Celtics stand now?

The Boston Celtics have been surprising one and all for the last five years, taking a group of overage superstars with one pint sized dynamo in Rondo and wrecking havoc in the Eastern Conference year after year. It seemed after every single year they were written off by everyone outside of Boston as has-beens. Oh sure, they’ll make the playoffs but they’re too old to keep up with teams like Thunder, Lakers, or Heat. And every year Boston has been proving naysayers wrong. Until this season. This season the Celtics were just fighting to shore up the 8th playoff spot in the East. That by itself gave enough fodder for naysayers to proclaim the Celtics dead. Paul Pierce is 35 years old and Kevin Garnett is 36. How long can they last? But the news which came yesterday seems like the final nail in the coffin, Rajon Rondo is done for the season with a torn ACL. Rondo tore his anterior cruciate ligament during the Celtics’ loss to the Hawks on Friday night. Presumably during this play-

“He thought it was his hamstring,” Doc Rivers said. “He never said anything about his knee. At our shootaround [on Sunday morning], he had the [ice] pack on the back of his hamstring. Doc [Brian] McKeon took a look and started moving it around and said to me, ‘I’m telling you, that’s an ACL. I’m pretty sure.’

As ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan asked Rondo about it before the game was over, Rondo replied “Who said that? A torn ACL? I don’t even have the results yet. I’m going to see the doc right now.” As he ambled toward the locker room, he asked, “Could I be walking around like this with a torn ACL?” Jackie replied “Yes. Guys have played with torn ACLs before.” “I don’t feel that bad,” Rondo said. “I don’t feel like I have something that serious, but I’ve never had one before. All I know is my leg felt funny.” Doc Rivers asked Rondo to be cautious. “I told him I remembered the next day after my [ACL tear] I felt pretty good,” Rivers said. “I thought the doctors were wrong.”

The diagnosis confirmed the worst. Rondo is out for the season. “It was a big blow to everybody in here, me included,” Garnett said. “Man, that hurt. It’s tough. We had a tough game, came in, and he told the whole team in the locker room. It’s tough, tough on everybody. Rondo is becoming the heart and soul of this team. He’s coming into his own. Had some bumps in the road, but we’re just trying to be supportive for him.”

The Celtics were playing the Heat without Rondo, and they won in a heroic double overtime effort. Dwyane Wade and LeBron James passed on their condolences to Rondo. “It sucks. It’s terrible. As much as a competitor and as much as I’ve been a rival with Boston over the years, I never want to see anyone go down and knowing the competitor that he is and knowing how talented he is, I think it’s terrible. Not only for their team but for the league.”- LeBron James

“We continue to say, one thing about this league is it’s a brotherhood,” Wade said. “You never want to see anyone go down with any kind of injury, especially a season-ending injury. So it’s very unfortunate and it sucks. He’s a great player and he really is the leader of this team and, obviously, guys are going to have to step up for them. But this year they lost the leader of their team, so it’s tough for the game to lose a player like Rondo, but especially for Boston.” That seems like a sweet insult, ‘especially for Boston’. But Wade has a point, the Celtics are an aging team and Rondo was the x-factor, the spark plug. Even when they had the Big 3 in Ray Allen with Pierce and Garnett, they still acknowledged that Rondo was the leader.

“He’s our leader, and it hurt. It’s tough to hear that news, one of our top players go down. We have to be there for him. We just have to continue to build. Everyone collectively has to step up. We still like our chances in the Eastern Conference,” Pierce said. “I mean, we feel like we can play with anybody with the team we put out there, even without Rondo. Guys are going to get an opportunity now, and we know guys have taken a lesser role because of the way our team is built. Now they’re going to have to take on a bigger role.

Rondo’s injury has thrown fuel on the rumours of a trade between the Celtics and Grizzlies, to bring Rudy Gay to the Celtics. Rudy had said that “It’s hard to talk to [Rondo] because he is always saying, ‘We need you over here. We need you over here. So it’s not easy talking to him. But he’s being a friend, just telling me about keeping everything together and he makes you feel like you are still valuable.” Rudy Gay is owed $16,460,532 this season and then $17,888,932 and $19,317,326 over the next two seasons, it’s not a light swing for the Celtics to experiment with. But there are rumours that Paul Pierce and Rudy Gay could swap teams before the trade deadline passes. There are only 38 games remaining for the Celtics in the regular season. There are chances that DeMarcus Cousins comes to the Celtics too. But it’s likely that for either player, Rudy or DeMarcus, the Celtics will have to part with their real trade chips, their young players such as Courtney Lee, Avery Bradley, Jeff Green, Brandon Bass or Fab Melo.

“Here’s the thing: If I wanted to say, ‘Hey, let’s play for the future,’ that’s hard to do. And if I play only for the ‘here and now,’ that’s hard to do.” Danny Ainge said “We’ve had success playing for short periods of time without Rajon. But we’ve never had to play without him for long periods of time. It will be an interesting test for us. Not a test we wanted. And, frankly, I’m worried about that test. “And we know we have guys that are more than capable of stepping up, whether it’s Courtney Lee, whether it’s [Leandro] Barbosa, we know these guys can play. It’s just that, with the system we have, with having Rondo be our primary playmaker, 48-minute guy, these guys probably haven’t really had a chance to showcase what they can do, and now they’re going to have that opportunity.”

Place whatever construction on that you feel comfortable with. It’s hard to play for now and it’s hard to trade for the future. It’s amazing how people in big places manage to say so much without actually saying anything. Of course, the Celtics may not shake things up at all. “We’re working hard and we’re trying to work our way out of this thing, out of this funk,” Garnett said. “No one’s going to walk through these doors and save us, we have to save ourselves. We created this mess, so we have to work our way out of it. I told you we have a bunch of fighters in here, a bunch of guys that are willing to work, put the work in. That’s what we’ve always been since I’ve been here under Doc’s regime.”

The Celtics have shooting guards who can dribble, to paraphrase Doc Rivers. And they do have the potential to hold down the fort. Rondo is irreplaceable of course, and a trade may just give the Celtics what they need to get over this hump. “We’ll find someone that’s already in our locker room who will step up,” Rivers said. “You can write the obituary, but I’m not. We’re going nowhere.”

Let’s hope not. Rondo is an incredible once in a generation talent and no one wants to see players go down like that. Nothing is going to make his departure better, but having the Celtics make it to the playoffs will be something that softens the blow at least a little. It seems like some cruel joke that Eastern Conference all star point guards keep having their ACLs torn, first it was Derrick Rose and now it’s Rondo. Hopefully by next season, Rondo will be back better than before with time to work on his jumper.