Monday marked Rajon Rondo’s first time facing the Los Angeles Lakers since his departure, and his old teammates had to make the most of it.
Lakers star Anthony Davis told reporters on Tuesday that the team trolled Rondo by drawing up a new play just to mess with him during the game.
“We called a play after a timeout, an ATO play, and [Rondo] was here last year, so he knows our plays and knows our system and everything like that, and he’s very good at scouting other teams’ plays and players and things like that,” said Davis, per Lakers writer Harrison Faigen. “So we ran the play and put him in some action and we ended up getting a foul of it, and I told him I was yelling [from the bench], I was yelling to him and told him, ‘You haven’t seen that one. That’s something new. You haven’t seen that one.’ He started laughing, we were laughing, so that was a cool moment.”
Lakers coach Frank Vogel also admitted as much after the game, a 107-99 victory for the Lakers.
“Everything we do is to try to trick Rondo,” said Vogel. “We know how smart he is and we had to add some deception to our game because he knows all of our packages. So we had a few extra tricks in there for him.”
The 34-year-old Rondo, a 15-season NBA veteran, left the Lakers to sign with the Hawks this past offseason. But he was a strong contributor to the Lakers’ 2020 title run, so he is obviously still very fondly remembered.
Rondo had to be a bit taken aback by such a turn of events on Monday though. After all, he is the one usually doing the trolling lately.
