What does Rajon Rondo's injury mean for the Los Angeles Lakers' chances in the NBA restart?
The Western Conference's leading team suffered the first injury since teams began practicing at the ESPN World Wide of Sports Complex outside of Orlando, Florida, with Rondo fracturing his right thumb in practice on Sunday. Rondo will undergo surgery and is expected to miss six to eight weeks, sidelining him at least through the start of the postponed 2020 playoffs.
How might the Lakers, already without starting guard Avery Bradley for the restart, replace Rondo? And will his injury affect the team's chances of reaching the NBA Finals for the first time since 2010? Let's take a look.
Seeding games an opportunity for Vogel to experiment
The good news for the Lakers is that they'll take a 5½-game lead in the West standings into the seeding games, meaning there's little chance they'll fall from first place in the conference. Even if the second-place LA Clippers go 8-0, the Lakers must win just three games to hold their spot. That will allow coach Frank Vogel to use the seeding games as an extended preseason, ramping up the minutes of starters while trying out new lineup combinations with both Rondo and Bradley unavailable.
In the short term, a key question is whether the Lakers can get away with playing lineups with both LeBron James and Alex Caruso on the bench. According to Cleaning the Glass data, the Lakers have played just 84 minutes all season with none of Bradley, Caruso, James and Rondo on the court. In those situations, Quinn Cook has served as the team's point guard. He is more of a spot-up shooter than a traditional playmaker like Rondo.
That question is meaningful in part because Caruso and James have played so well together this season. The Lakers have outscored opponents by 20.8 points per 100 possessions with both players on the court, the best of any two-player combination that has seen at least 200 minutes of action for the team, according to NBA Advanced Stats data. If Vogel needs to keep one of Caruso and James on the court at all times to run the offense, that will make it more difficult to play them together to fill the hole created by Bradley's absence.
The other upside for the Lakers is that Rondo's absence means more minutes during the seeding games for new shooting guards JR Smith and Dion Waiters, neither of whom has yet played for the team. Waiters signed just before play stopped in March, while Smith joined the roster as a substitute for Bradley. The more the two play now, the better idea the coaching staff will have whether they can help in the playoffs.
Depending on the matchup, Lakers might not need Rondo
Based on the timetable, the Lakers will likely not have Rondo for the first round of the playoffs, which begins in five weeks and will wrap up in about seven weeks -- the median time he is expected to miss. How much that matters might depend on who ends up eighth in the West, a spot that's up for grabs in the seeding games.
The Memphis Grizzlies enter the restart in eighth, but the play-in matchup gives the five West teams behind them in the standings a chance to make the playoffs without catching the Grizzlies. The Lakers probably don't want to face the Portland Trail Blazers, a year removed from the Western Conference finals and whose backcourt of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum could present greater challenges for a short-handed Lakers group.
By contrast, a bigger Lakers backcourt might actually match up better with the New Orleans Pelicans, whose backcourt of the 6-foot-3 Jrue Holiday and 6-foot-6 Lonzo Ball can present problems for smaller opponents. They might be able to take advantage of the smaller Cook, who is listed at 6-foot-1, like Rondo, but lacks Rondo's wingspan. Aside from that, more minutes for the 6-foot-5 Caruso and the Lakers' bigger wings could help against New Orleans.
Will Lakers need Rondo at all?
Of course, we've punted thus far on the biggest question of Rondo's injury: Might it actually help the Lakers play more effective lineups? Per Cleaning the Glass, their minus-6.8 net rating with Rondo on the court is the worst of any player who has seen more than 400 minutes of action this season. Although the Caruso-James pairing has been particularly effective, lineups with Caruso at point guard and James on the bench have been far more effective (plus-3.5 net rating).
There are two reasons to believe Rondo might have more value to the Lakers than those numbers indicate. The first is Bradley's absence, which already was likely to force Caruso into a larger role. It's not realistic for Caruso to jump from serving as fifth guard and averaging 17.8 minutes per game to both filling in for Bradley as an on-ball defender with the starting five and replacing Rondo as backup point guard. At some point, Vogel will have to pick and choose where Caruso fits best.
The second is the well-known phenomenon of "Playoff Rondo," who has been more productive in the postseason than the regular season for years. When I looked at the biggest active playoff overachievers during the 2019 postseason, Rondo ranked fourth on the list, and two of the three players ahead of him (James and Kawhi Leonard) have won multiple Finals MVPs. (Intriguingly, the Lakers also boast a third player in the top five by that method in backup center Dwight Howard.)
The most recent time we saw Rondo in the playoffs, in 2018 with the Pelicans, he led all players with 12.2 assists per game and recorded eight double-doubles in nine games as New Orleans unexpectedly swept the higher-seeded Blazers before losing in five to the eventual champion Golden State Warriors. While the bright lights of the playoffs can't solve Rondo's inefficient scoring (he boasts a career .485 true shooting percent in the postseason), he does enough elsewhere to be a valuable role player in these settings.
The trickiest aspect of Rondo's absence might ultimately be his return midway through what the Lakers expect will be a deep playoff run. Ideally, they'd take care of business quickly in the first round without him, giving Rondo time to integrate in practice ahead of a more competitive second-round matchup. Still, Rondo's first game action in more than five months will come in the crucible of playoff basketball, meaning there's some risk in bringing him back as a rotation player. If Rondo is rusty, that could be costly for the Lakers.
As a result, we might not know for another couple of months just how costly a break the Lakers suffered with Rondo's thumb.