Rondo: “I haven’t played defense in a couple of years”

If you haven’t heard, a certain enigmatic point guard is back in town today to play his former team.

Rajon Rondo held court with a throng of media types in his first shoot-around as a visitor and he trollolololol’ed his haters with this:

I haven’t played defense in a couple of years. I’ve been able to hide it a lot with Avery Bradley on the ball. He’s helped me out, the young guy. But here they expect me to play defense. And in the West, if you don’t play defense you’ll get embarrassed every night at the point guard position. I took it as a challenge (for) myself.

And the internet loved it, with my favorite reaction being this one.

Rondo is hilarious. For someone who claims not to pay attention to media talk about him, he sure does respond to the media talk a lot.

— Evans Clinchy (@evansclinchy) January 2, 2015

It’s one of the more underrated facets of Rondo’s personality. He plays it so aloof, but he knows everything that’s being said about him.

The defense thing is no real secret. We’ve known for quite some time that Rondo shifted his focus more to the offensive end and that Bradley was the ball-hawk. This would have been a nice opportunity to follow up, though, on exactly WHY Rondo wasn’t playing defense. Did he just not care? Did he feel like he played a different role now? What’s the deal?

Or maybe we just don’t care anymore. I think Rondo was needling the media as much as he was admitting a flaw in his game. I’m sure guys like Felger and Tanguay instantly got hard hearing this admission because it’s going to give them another chance to piss on his grave in Boston.  I’m looking forward to the rousing ovation he gets tonight.

The other quote of note was his surprise at the trade:

I was surprised. I was actually asleep around 5 o’clock and I woke up, and I seen Danny popped up (on the phone). So I was like, ‘Oh, sh–.’ So that’s when it happened. And he called me and told me to come out to the facility, and it happened.

Head on over to MassLive for the full transcript of Rondo’s interview.  Celtics.com has the video.