The Celtics played their second game without Rajon Rondo and played quite well in their dominant 18-point, 99-81 win over the Sacramento Kings at the TD Garden Wednesday night. It was an extremely balanced attack, with six players reaching double-figures led by Paul Pierce with 16 points. One negative was rookie Jared Sullinger left the game in the first quarter and did not return due to back spasms.

Overall, it was a very impressive performance, granted it was against the Kings and they shot over 50 percent from the floor. It will be interesting to see how long this will be able to keep up as Pierce and Kevin Garnett can’t play big minutes night in and night out and then expect to be at full strength for the playoffs. They will need to get contributions from everyone, like they did on Wednesday night for them to make any run late in the year and potentially win a playoff series.

Up tempo style works for C’s– Baxter Holmes has getting up and down the court quick, and looking to run was one of the ways the team overcame Rondo.

Running without Rajon Rondo– Steve Bulpett also has how pushing the tempo was one of the main keys for the Celtics.

Bradley-Lee backcourt trumps Kings– Chris Forsberg says Avery Bradley and Courtney Lee stepped up big in the win.

You don’t want Demarcus Cousins on the Celtics– Ben Rohrbach has after seeing Cousins play Wednesday night, Celtics fans should not want the team to make a move for him.

Victory of Kings gives Celtics winning blueprint– A. Sherrod Blakely looks at how the team played Wednesday is how they will need to play most of the games the rest of the season as they try and win without Rondo.

A lot of discussion the past few days in the sports media world has been about the article in Boston Magazine for their February edition which came out earlier this week, which was critical of the state of the Boston sports media. The author, Alan Siegal, did a podcast with WEEI’s Kirk Minihane on Tuesday and it is a must listen as Minihane did a fantastic job of challenging Siegal on the points he brought up in the piece.

Published by Bruce Allen

Automattician.

4 thoughts on “Game 2 without Rondo, Celtics top Kings”

  1. Last night, immediately after the win, Donnie Marshall started in on the “it was only the Kings, Rondo haters” mantra, with Gary cheering him on. I can’t see this changing and feel like its going to be the theme going forward.

    The “Green Teamers” seem ready to defend Rondo’s value to the team with every win a or loss. Win? It was other guys stepping up but Rondo would have helped. Loss? “We could have used Rondo”
    Flip the arguments from the folks who are on the other end. Throw some stats at it? Stats aren’t a win, met with the “you can’t put a stat on the value Rondo gives the team.”

    It makes me think that we won’t appreciate or fully understand his value until he’s gone, if and when this happens.

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  2. I would say the Minihane podcast was more Alan Siegel doing a terrible job of defending his story and having a shockingly shallow understanding of the Boston sports media landscape.

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    1. Kirk did a better job explaining what was wrong with the story than I did in the comments the other day that’s for sure.

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