Rajon Rondo raced up and down the pitch with his teammates during a scrimmage while LeBron James shot free throws on a different pitch.
In recent weeks Rondo has reinstated himself in the Lakers’ daily operations and is close to a comeback. Lakers manager Frank Vogel said he hopes to have Rondo available in Friday’s game against the Rockets or Thunder and that he participated in both of the Lakers’ mandatory tests this week.
“He was good. He communicated a lot, which he always does, ”said guard mate Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. “He is a great leader in addition to the other two leaders we have. I like … just being on the pitch with him puts everyone in their positions. He’s the hall general when he’s out there, always talking trying to get people into position. Just being here and having him here is great for us. “
Rondo did not play for the Lakers in the NBA recovery. The team discovered he had a broken thumb on July 12, and Rondo left the Disney World campus shortly afterwards for surgery. He came back a month later.
The Lakers have a good idea of Rondo’s rehabilitation process as he works to get back to top speed since he sustained several injuries during his two seasons in LA
“This is the part, you can do so much in practice as far as simple scrimmaging is concerned, but it’s different from the game,” Caldwell-Pope said. “I feel it will get there. Probably just one or two games, maybe. But he’s showing signs of what he’s got – he’s just picking up everything we’ve had since he left and he’s learning fast. “
Long distance
The team that wins Game 7 between Rockets and Thunder will only have one day to prepare for the second round against the Lakers.
The Lakers, however, will have six days between games to mentally reset and move on to a first-round series win against Portland.
“We have an older crew, a veteran crew,” guard Danny Green said. “I think it just helps us. But at the same time, I think we want to keep the beat, keep playing. I think the teams want to keep playing, they want to keep the pace.
“But for the older groups, I think it’s more beneficial to them than anyone else to actually have a few days off, to be able to relax a bit, take a break, especially in these kinds of circumstances where there aren’t many escapes. “.
Caldwell-Pope believes the key to staying sharp during the long hiatus is staying in the movie theater.
“We haven’t played in nearly a week, we just walked into the movie theater, looking at little keys to improve, what we can do better and also what we need to fix,” Caldwell-Pope said. “So he’s been going to the movie theater a lot and practically transferring it.”
Savings for the playoffs
While the Lakers continued to wait to find out who their opponent would be, Vogel took no solace in the team’s seeding matches against the Houston Rockets or the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Both teams beat the Lakers in the bubble during their top matches.
“We have learned that one of these two teams can beat us,” Vogel said. “This is lesson number one.”
But Vogel also admitted that the Lakers held back in those games.
“We were still competing to win those games,” Vogel said. “But obviously, when you get into a seven-game playoff series there are so many other things you can get creative with on both sides of the ball that you wouldn’t see in a game like that, a regular season game, or a seeding game. So, for the most part, we’ve played them pretty straight and the creativity comes now. “
This is a standard procedure especially for teams who have the convenience of knowing their playoff status is not in doubt.
“We’ve had more meetings on these things than working on them in practice,” Vogel said. “There are definitely things that – for example, in the Portland series, there are definitely things we didn’t do in the regular season that we did in all of the Portland trials prior to that. But we haven’t done any of that in the last two workouts, we just focused on ourselves. “
