Boston’s offense is a mess, so is Rajon Rondo

Point guard Rajon Rondo's recent struggles have mirrored those of Boston's offense. (Getty Images)

I’m well aware how dangerous it can be, especially after last season, to place any importance on anything these veteran-heavy Celtics do between Christmas and April. But still: Do you realize how badly this team is playing on offense right now? In the last 10 games, Boston has scored more than its season points-per-possession average just three times and scored fewer than 99 points per 100 possessions six times, according to Hoopdata.

The Cavaliers have the worst offense in the league, and they average about 98.5 points per 100 possessions. So the Celtics’ offense has played at the level of the league’s worst team six times in 10 games — and they’ve been significantly below that level (i.e. 94 points per 100 possessions or worse) in four of those 10 games. That is some seriously bad offense, and it has dropped Boston to 18th in points per possession for the season. This doesn’t amount to a season-on-the-brink crisis, since the team is still neck-and-neck with Chicago atop the league’s defensive rankings, and having an elite defense has historically been a bit more important than having an elite offense when it comes to contending for a title. But a team’s job becomes much harder when it plays below-average ball on one end of the floor.

It’s easy to blame Rajon Rondo, who is in perhaps the worst slump of his career. But keep in mind that the Celtics are integrating new guys (Troy Murphy, Sasha Pavlovic, Jeff Green, Carlos Arroyo), re-integrating Delonte West and waiting endlessly for the theoretical return of someone whose last name is O’Neal. (It’s also easy to blame the loss of Kendrick Perkins, but he is a defensive specialist more than anything else, and the team’s defense has remained sturdy since the deadline-day stunner that sent him to the Thunder.)

With Rondo, we all know he’s slumping, particularly from the field; he’s just 31-of-98 (31.6 percent) over his last 10 games, and he is no longer making long two-point jumpers — the shots every team is going to give him — at an acceptable rate. Over his last 20 games, Rondo is 25-of-80 (31 percent) on long twos, a cold streak that has taken his percentage on those shots back down below the league average. His accuracy on shorter shots — floater-types — has been awful all season, though that figures to correct itself to some degree eventually.

None of this is particularly bothersome. Rondo is simply not a good jump shooter – he never has been and it’s going to hurt Boston’s offense as much now as it always has. If you watched the Celtics’ loss to Memphis on Wednesday, you saw Doc Rivers take the ball out of Rondo’s hands almost completely over the last five minutes of the game, choosing instead to run things through Paul Pierce. And that’s fine, in some ways; Pierce is a fantastic scorer and a nice pick-and-roll player. But Boston comes dangerously close to playing four-on-five in these situations, as Rondo is left to wander off the ball (usually along the baseline) and his defender doesn’t have to pay such close attention to him.

What’s more bothersome is that Rondo, who’s in his physical prime at age 25 and whose quickness is almost unmatched, has a statistical profile that looks more like that of Steve Novak or Jason Kidd in one crucial way: He is not getting to the line at all. Rondo averages only 1.8 foul shots in 37 minutes per game, down from 3.5 attempts in 36.6 minutes last season.

This is not a run-of-the-mill aversion to free throws; this is a historic low. Here’s the full list of players, just 18 in all, who have logged at least 35 minutes per game in any season in the three-point era and attempted fewer than two foul shots. A 25-year-old point guard doesn’t belong on this list – it consists almost entirely of spot-up shooters (Raja Bell, Shane Battier, Peja Stojakovic and late-career versions of Dan Majerle, Jim Jackson and Jason Kidd); other nearly done old guys (Sonics-era Horace Grant, Raptors-era Charles Oakley); and two very bizarre players who together comprise seven of the 28 player seasons in which this has happened (Dennis Rodman and Mookie Blaylock).

This has to change. Rondo is a poor free-throw shooter, but Boston will be worse off if the solution to that problem is to avoid taking shots in the lane or aiming to draw contact. The greater threat Rondo is to score, the more attention defenses must pay him, and that attention will result in better looks for the veterans elsewhere on the floor.

The Celtics’ offense has been weird all season. They don’t shoot threes (only two teams have attempted fewer), they get to the line at a middling rate and they have a chance to post the lowest recorded offensive rebounding rate in league history. They have relied on hitting the first two-point shot they take, and they survived well enough until the last month or so. They survived for many reasons: They have three shooters who are having excellent shooting seasons (Ray Allen, Pierce and Kevin Garnett); they have a whip-smart playbook; and, perhaps most important, they have a creative point guard who can get into the lane, break down defenses and feed guys the ball where they want. No team assists on a higher percentage of its baskets than Boston, and Rondo is the main reason for that.

But that model has hit the skids lately, and it has always required Rondo to be at his best. Boston’s field-goal accuracy, once better than 50 percent, is now at 48.7 percent. The Celtics have taken more long two-point jumpers per game than all but seven teams — a big reversal for a team that in past seasons had avoided the long two in favor of threes and close shots. The system works fine as long as the shots are wide open and come as the result of crisp possession.

All this could just be a blip for a team that knows how to keep another gear in reserve and is going through some roster turmoil. But if it can’t play even average offense, Boston is no longer a smart bet to get out of the East.