NBA must rescind Rondo’s unearned assist

(UPDATE: A league spokesman just e-mailed to tell me the league will indeed rescind the assist when officials complete their audit of the game. Good to hear.)

We’ve known for a while now that home-cooking can provide some minor inflation to a point guard’s assist totals, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before: Rajon Rondo was credited for an assist Monday night against Orlando for a play on which another Celtic made the pass that led to the score.

Kudos to Mark from ShamSports for catching this. As you can seen from the video in that link above, the fake assist in question came on the first possession of the game, when the Celtics ran one of their most often-used sets: a curl play for Ray Allen the team calls “floppy.” As Rondo dribbled up top, Allen curled up around a Shaquille O’Neal screen and received a pass from Rondo on the left wing. As often happens on this play, the screener’s man (Dwight Howard) had to slide up toward Allen in order to prevent Ray from hoisting a wide-open jumper. Allen noticed this and quickly whipped a bounce pass to Shaq, who dribbled and spun (and probably traveled) for a couple of seconds before banking in a layup.

Let’s ignore the possible traveling violation and the fact O’Neal probably does enough individual work here to negate any assist ruling on the play.

Allen passed the ball to Shaq! If anyone gets an assist here, it should quite obviously be Allen and not the NBA’s current assist leader. Lots of folks like the concept of tracking hockey assists, but the league doesn’t do so, and Rondo has no business getting a bonus assist here.

I thought at first that this had to have been an error in the play-by-play logs, but it appears Rondo actually did get credit for this assist. It appears as a Rondo dime in both ESPN.com’s play-by-play and the official play-by-play at NBA.com, and both of those logs credit Rondo with exactly 13 assists — the same number listed in the official box score. (I had thought perhaps the play-by-play logs would list 14 Rondo assists, and that the official box score might credit Rondo with just 13 if someone had noticed the error.)

The league has to rescind this assist. There is no gray area here. Nothing is open to the scorekeeper’s interpretation. Allen threw the pass that led to the O’Neal score.

I realize I’m nitpicking here, and this might be more of an innocent oversight — Allen threw the pass in a blur — than any sort of friendly hometown scoring. But die-hard fans notice these little things, and they eventually chip away at the credibility of numbers. And numbers should be as close to sacred as we can make them.