Rajon Rondo has told wild stories before, but this one might be the most Rondo story of all. On All The Smoke, he walked through a moment that almost blew up the entire Celtics locker room. Not metaphorically, an actual TV got destroyed, and he and Doc Rivers nearly fought in the middle of a film session.
“We watching film. We talking about Chauncey Billups for some reason. And I think Chauncey didn’t have a great game that particular game. But Rip was killing us off of floppy action. So I just knew coming to film, it can’t be me today. We go in film, something happened, Chauncey happened, why is this shot even there.”
“All right, cool. Two, three possessions later,… I’m looking across, and Shaq looking at me like, be cool. He’s like, don’t do it. And I’m ready to go crazy.”
“So I’m like, man, why are we here talking about me when Rip had like 32 or something last night, you know what I mean? So that’s what kind of pissed me off.”
“And I’m like, man f**k it. I jump up, throw the water by the TV. TV explode. Boom, busted. Busted. Me and Doc immediately trying to go at it.”
“They got in between us or whatever. They told me to get my ass out, go take a walk. I’m shirt off. It’s like 32 degrees in Boston. I take a walk down the street. Come back in. I said I gotta get my s**t, I get out.”
“And what I love and respect the most is the one person that called me that night was Kevin Garnett. And he was like, ‘You was wrong.’ I was like, ‘What?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, man. You was wrong.’ I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’
“So him holding me accountable like that. Like I said, at that time I’m like, man f**k, how am I wrong when you know it’s like you pointing the finger at me, and I’m not the problem. Like call it, you know, call it how it is. Call a spade a spade.”
“So that’s why I was frustrated. And like I said, from that day forward, we’ve always been tight ever since.”
Looking back, it sounds funny because he can laugh about it now. But in the moment, it was serious. A starting point guard throwing a water bottle through a TV and trying to get at his head coach is the kind of thing that usually closes a season or kills the chemistry immediately.
Instead, that Celtics team held steady. They were already built around pressure and honesty, and hard conversations. They had veterans who weren’t scared to tell someone they were out of line. And they had Rajon Rondo, who played with the same fire that sometimes boiled over.
They might not love remembering the day the TV died, but they came out of it with something bigger. A reset. A truth session. And a long stretch where the coach and the point guard finally started seeing the same game again.
