| Rondo, His Head Cleared, Does It All |
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| Written by Chris Sheridan | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 First, let's take a closer look at how Allen got the ball in his hands, because there's a story inside that story that turned out to be a major subplot to the story line of the game -- the astounding individual performance put on by Rajon Rondo, who fought through a sprained ankle and had a triple-double of 19 points, 16 assists and 12 rebounds to lead Boston past Chicago 118-115 Monday night to even their first-round playoff series at one game apiece. The game-winning 3-pointer by Allen came with two seconds remaining after Rondo, with Derrick Rose playing far off him, turned to his right and fired a two-handed chest pass that hit Allen's hands waist-high. If you've ever seen a coach demonstrate the proper procedure for throwing a two-handed chest pass, you'll appreciate the technique and precision behind this one. The palms of both hands flicked outward simultaneously, the ball snapped loose and traveled with a considerable amount of zip, and one of the league's best pure shooters buried the last of his 30 points to cap an iron-willed performance that helped make up for his 1-for-12 atrocity in Boston's Game 1 loss. So, you ask, what was so special about that pass? If it was textbook, why make a big deal out of it? Because it was a simple play, as simple and fundamentally executed as they come. And it came at the end of a night in which Boston coach Doc Rivers decided early on that making things easy rather than complicated for Rondo was going to pay dividends. The way Rivers explained it, Rondo was in his ear before the game asking question after question about every conceivable facet of the game, so many questions -- "they were all great questions" -- that Rivers stopped himself in his tracks and summoned Rondo back after answering the last one, believing he had just done his point guard a disservice. Wait a minute, Rivers said to himself, I'm complicating things here when I needn't be. Yes, Rondo's questions were all appropriate ones coming from a dedicated student of the game (Rivers listed some examples: "What can I do defensively? Offensively? Am I dribbling too much? Am I not getting the ball to Paul [Pierce]? Are we not posting enough?"), but there comes a point when the brain is doing too much work and the body not enough, and Rivers wanted to make sure Rondo's yin and yang were in balance. "He was asking all these questions about what he needed to do, and I told him a bunch of stuff. And then when he left, I got to thinking: 'That's too many questions,'" Rivers recounted. "And so when I walked back in the locker room I said to him, 'Look, you have the keys to the team, just go out and play. And stop asking me questions,' and I thought the first seven minutes of that ballgame were the best seven minutes I had ever seen him play." But Rondo's great play didn't end there, though he went through a dry spell after reaching his triple-double prior to the midpoint of the third quarter. The Bulls had refused to yield throughout the course of the evening, answering and silencing each of Boston's runs, and they still weren't yielding as Ben Gordon (42 points) was raining down one absurd, impossible jumper after another. Chicago was ahead 111-108 with 1:47 left before Rondo performed the finale of his magic act. A 22-foot jumper over Joakim Noah flying at him with 1:01 left gave Boston a 113-112 lead before Gordon answered with yet another ridiculously difficult jumper to put the Bulls back ahead by one. Rondo tried to answer and missed, but he grabbed his own rebound (he had seven of 'em, as did Kendrick Perkins, to help account for a 21-8 edge on the offensive boards -- and 32-12 advantage in second-chance points -- that Rivers said were the keys to the game.) Rondo's offensive rebound was dished out to Allen, whose fifth 3-pointer put Boston up 115-113. Gordon beat two defenders going to his left and buried another jumper to tie it, scoring the last of his 42 points and setting up the Rondo-Allen heroics on the final play. "As Rondo goes, we go," said Pierce. Rivers described Pierce as "tentative" in accounting for 18 points on 8-of-19 shooting, but Boston's star was bailed out by the work of two of other starters, Perkins (16 points, 12 rebounds) and Glen Davis (26 points, nine rebounds). Rivers again got very, very little from his bench (no Celtics reserve had a positive plus-minus for the second straight game, with Mikki Moore a minus-15 and Stephon Marbury a minus-17) and had to shorten his rotation even further when Leon Powe went out with a sprained knee that Rivers feared was fairly seriously injured. Rivers has had to turn a team that was once led by the Big Three (in hindsight, it doesn't seem quite fair that Rondo has been excluded from that threesome given all he's accomplished the past two seasons) into a team that basically amounts to a Big Five -- all of them starters -- and the defending champs will remain in serious jeopardy if they're going to keep needing career nights out of guys to get past a No. 7 seed. Then again, these Bulls were playing as well as anybody in the East except Cleveland over the last few weeks of the regular season. They've managed to dictate the pace of the series, and they are defending the basket with zeal (14 blocks Monday). Plus, they're the league's fifth-best team when it comes to scoring points in the fourth quarter -- a pretty nifty résumé line for a team with the league's 16th-best record. Games 3 and 4 are in Chicago on Thursday night and Sunday afternoon. "I think our best is yet to come in this series," Pierce said, uttering a comment that Celtics Nation can only hope is true. Because the champs are already being pushed hard by a team that shows no fear of them, and now they have to prove they can be as good away from the New Garden as they are inside it -- something they failed to accomplish last postseason until the playoffs were more than a month old. We've got quite a series here, but we're also one miss or make away from this thing being 2-0 in either team's favor. If we're lucky, we'll continue to see overtimes and buzzer-beaters, triple-doubles, breakouts by rookies like the one Derrick Rose had Saturday, insane shots (think Gordon) and clutch shots (think Allen, at least in Game 2, anyway). If not, we'll at least have the memory of two terrific tilts in Boston that started the Celtics' quest for Banner No. 18.
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