Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen

Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen rise to occasion

By Steve Buckley
Thursday, May 31, 2012

MIAMI — However it all shakes out, Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals is going to be remembered as the night Rajon Rondo [stats] played all those minutes and scored all those points.

As in all 53 minutes in the Celtics [team stats]’ crushing 115-111 overtime loss to the Miami Heat last night at American Airlines [AMR] Arena.

As in a whopping 44 points, making for the most explosive offensive effort of Rondo’s career.
But, yes, the Celtics did lose, and decorum demands that Rondo’s effort be the footnote to that loss, not the other way around. But here’s the thing: This was the rare game in which the losing team produced not one but two significant story lines. You had your Rondo storyline, and you had — insert gasps of surprise here — your Ray Allen storyline.
Can we all agree that Rajon Rondo had a 44-point playoff game in him? Of course! He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s talented and, of course, the red-hot glare of the national spotlight agrees with him.
But can we also agree that Ray Allen didn’t have any clutch, let’s-send-this-baby-into-overtime shots remaining in his decidedly dented tank? He had looked every bit the old and injured player that he is in Game 1, Celts coach Doc Rivers being so candid as to put it out there that “. . . his leg is out on
every shot, and Ray is up and down. If you drew a square box, usually Ray lands in the box, and right now he’s all over the place.”
Yet with 34 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, the Celtics down by three, it was Ray Allen who, finding himself preposterously open, netted a old-timey, nothing-but-net 3-pointer to send the game to overtime.
He loved it . . . until the Celtics lost it.
“At that point, it was winning time,” he said after the game.
If you watched the game, you’re likely focusing on what went wrong in overtime, and how the officials again hurt the Celtics by blowing enough whistles to foul Paul Pierce [stats], Mickael Pietrus and Keyon Dooling out of the game.
But before all that came down, the Celtics had a one-man Throwback Night when Allen threw in that trey.
Anybody see that coming? Anybody see him logging 43 minutes? Anybody see him scoring a workmanlike 13 points?
“The whole game I felt good,” said Allen, who sounded sad. “I had really no issues moving around the floor.”
It had started during the morning — very early in the morning, when he arrived at the shootaround an hour before everybody else so that he could, well, shoot around. You’d think he’d want to rest the banged-up ankle, except that he had a choice: Work on the shot and ignore the pain, or become subservient to the pain and risk another night of clanged shots.
He chose the shootaround-before-the-shootaround route. It got him a 3-pointer. It got the Celtics into overtime, even if, in the end, it still landed them in a gaping 0-2 hole in this series.

As for the ankle?
“As the game went on, it was almost like I forgot about it,” he said. “I forgot about my foot and eventually I just kept playing and I didn’t have any issues.”
Well, there remains one very sticky issue: He still has a bum ankle and, even more telling, he is still on the cusp of hitting his 37th birthday. So if you’re expecting a young kid who is going to take over a game, well, those honors belong to someone else.

In fact, Ray Allen as much said so late last night, when a reporter asked him about the “championship drive,” or something like that, being “translated” toRajon Rondo [stats].
“Yeah, we feed off what he’s doing now,” said Allen, speaking these words with Rondo seated to his left. The key word here was “now,” the idea being that Rondo is all about now and the future, and that the working parts of the Big Three, while still very much a part of the present, are not part of the future.
But Ray Allen did find enough working parts to give the Celtics [team stats] a fighting chance last night, and he did this partly because he won a shouting match with his bum right ankle.
It was enough to keep the Celtics in the game. Reality being what it is, it wasn’t enough to win a game.