Rajon Rondo made headlines by claiming the Boston Celtics were able to hang 61 points on the Miami Heat in the first half of Sunday's Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals because Miami players were "crying to referees" rather than getting back in transition. He wasn't wrong — more than once, Heat players (including stars LeBron James and Dwyane Wade) failed to bust it back and prevent an odd-man rush — but Rondo's comments still ignore a pretty important reason for the offensive onslaught.

Namely, that Boston's point guard has gone from "capable of making ridiculous plays" to "routinely making the ridiculous seem reasonable," as he did throughout Boston's series-evening 93-91 overtime victory, and as he did with this sublime second-quarter setup to a cutting Paul Pierce.

ESPN play-by-play man Mike Breen called the dish, which came right on the heels of an excellent lob to Kevin Garnett for an and-one dunk, "another beauty" from the Celtics point guard. Breen's broadcast colleague, color commentator and former NBA coach Jeff Van Gundy, quickly said that descriptor didn't do Rondo's dime justice.

"He is throwing the ball on that bounce pass to a spot on the floor that few can see," said Van Gundy, who went on to call the pass something that "anyone else in this league can't do right now."

There are other point guards in the league capable of deftly threading the needle, of course — memories of pinpoint deliveries from Jason Kidd, Steve Nash and Chris Paul spring to mind — but none of those guys are playing right now. And frankly, even if they were around and playing at peak form, we'd be talking about prospective peers for Rondo rather than superiors.

Charles Barkley is on a horse. (Getty Images)

I mean, no mask, no gun, no Tonto, no kerchief. This is just sloppy work, Charles. I expected more from a ... no, wait, I actually did not expect more at all. I didn't even expect this.

On the plus side, that horse is one of the coolest things Barkley has ever won playing blackjack with Baltic contessas. Hi-ho, Silver.

Best caption wins the Lone Rangers' hit 1994 single, "Degenerated," from a movie I am depressed to have watched a lot on HBO in the late '90s. Good luck.

In our last adventure: Big bully Kevin Garnett sits on Udonis Haslem, which is almost definitely going to get him sent to Principal Stern's office.

Kevin Garnett sits on Udonis Haslem. (Getty Images)

Listen, I think we can all agree that Kevin Garnett is no Masahiro Chono when it comes to applying the STF. But it's really important to him that he learns it, and I think we should all support him. See how Udonis Haslem is supporting him? Let's support him like that. Seriously, it will barely hurt at all, because he is so bad at submission wrestling. Just be nice. After Wednesday night, he needs it.

Best caption wins a limited edition Masa Chono mini-doll (not really). Good luck.

In our last adventure: Scott Brooks calls the Oklahoma City Thunder's signature play: The Kevin McCallister Gambit. (BTW: Very strong work, gang. Proud of you.)

The entire basketball-observing world already expected former University of Kentucky star Anthony Davis to be the No. 1 overall selection in next month's 2012 NBA draft; now that the 2012 NBA draft lottery's done, we know he'll most likely be going to the New Orleans Hornets, who entered Wednesday night's drawing with the fourth-best odds of coming away with the top selection but leaped over the Charlotte Bobcats, Washington Wizards and (by virtue of losing an amazingly fortuitous coin flip) Cleveland Cavaliers to take home the evening's grand prize.

With draft-loving eyes now trained solely on how Davis will fit in the Big Easy, the monobrowed monster joined Dan Patrick on his nationally syndicated radio show on Thursday morning to talk about how the settling of the lottery impacted the 19-year-old big man. Davis said he was "very nervous" while watching the lottery, not so much because he was concerned which team would wind up with the top pick, but because seeing the whole process unfold in front of your eyes can be sort of nerve-wracking.

He also said he hadn't yet heard from anybody in the Hornets organization, that he wasn't too keen on having his mom move down to the Bayou from her home in Chicago ("I might let her get a house down here, but that's too close") and that his family kind of liked the idea of him going to the Charlotte Bobcats, where he could play for owner and Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan, whom Davis loved growing up in the Windy City. (I think a lot of Bobcats fans would agree, no matter how stoked the organization is with the No. 2 pick.)

The interview's most interesting moment, though, came when Patrick asked Davis who he's most looking forward to playing against in the pros, an exchange you can hear in the clip above, thanks to the folks at CSNChicago.com:

"The guy I'm looking forward to playing against is one of my teammates — if they get drafted, one of my teammates, in the NBA, to have the opportunity to reunite with them and try to beat them," Davis replied.

"But you want to, like, dunk over [Michael] Kidd-Gilchrist or DeMarcus [Cousins] — I mean, you were only there one year, you can't have that many guys to play against," Patrick replied. "You don't want to go against LeBron [James] or Kobe [Bryant] or Dwight Howard?"

"Um, probably Kobe," Davis said.

In previewing the Eastern Conference finals matchup between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics, I had a really hard time trying to figure out ways the Celtics could win games. Here are the two I was able to come up with:

1. They'd stand a real good chance if they hit 60 percent of their shots from the floor, like they did on April 10;

2. Failing that (because it's really hard for an entire team to make three out of every five shots against air, let alone a top-four NBA defense), "for Boston to have any chance of scoring enough to beat Miami, Rondo must be ridiculous."

Well ...

I think we can fairly call 44 points on 24 shots, 10 assists, eight rebounds and three steals with just three turnovers (seriously, THREE TURNOVERS) while playing 53 minutes — that's every second of all four quarters, plus overtime — in a must-win Eastern Conference finals game "ridiculous."

Of course, as you know, whether or not I think the Celtics "must" have won Game 2 to have any chance in this series, they didn't. They lost a "demoralizing" 115-111 overtime affair that saw Boston turn a 15-point lead into a seven-point deficit, then charge back to hold a five-point advantage with less than five minutes remaining, only to see it all go away. Boston didn't shoot 60 percent — just a tick under 50, in the final analysis — but they played something like their perfect game, got arguably the best individual performance of the Big Three/Four era, and it still wasn't enough.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember that it was still freakin' something.

The Charlotte Bobcats entered Wednesday night's 2012 NBA draft lottery with the best odds of snagging the top overall selection and the right to draft Kentucky star Anthony Davis, their grim reward for an awful 7-59 season that, percentage-wise, was the worst in NBA history. Well, they didn't. The New Orleans Hornets did. The Bobcats will pick second overall.

You'd forgive folks in the Bobcats organization if they spent the hours after losing out on a potentially franchise-shifting centerpiece crying in their beers and waxing wistful for days they'll never have. Instead, though, they appear to have turned into the skid in a pretty hilariously admirable way.

Bravo, Bobcats. (Screencap via www.bobcats.com)

That there is a screencap of the splash page greeting visitors to the Charlotte Bobcats' official website on Thursday morning. It includes:

You can understand why plenty of people — tweeting players, whispering league executives and couch-bound joke-makers alike — cocked an eyebrow skyward when NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver announced Wednesday night that the Charlotte Bobcats would make the second overall selection in the 2012 NBA draft. Reporters who've seen the ping-pong balls get pulled can swear up and down it's all on the level, and diligent fans can work back through history to find evidence of a fix lacking, but the appearance of impropriety inherent in a team that was owned by the NBA up until about seven weeks ago winding up winning the 2012 NBA draft lottery and the right to select Kentucky stud Anthony Davis ... well, evidence or no, people like to believe in things. In the absence of something better, they'll take a conspiracy.

After watching an owner skip town, a generational point guard shipped out and an abandon-all-hope-of-scoring 21-45 season, fans of the New Orleans Hornets do have something better — the chance to watch Kentucky big man Anthony Davis cover five to seven yards of court space for the next five to seven years. And, as they showed during a Hornets lottery watch party at Manning's Eat-Drink-Cheer in downtown New Orleans on Wednesday night, they're pretty stoked about it:

As well they should be.

Wanda Pratt, Kevin Durant's mom, wears a shirt that is now officially not illegal. (AP)Welcome back to Ball Don't Lie, your one-stop shop for news on legal strife related to NBA-related terms and phrases. Next up: The end of the road for a remarkably ill-considered lawsuit over ownership of a commonly yelled phrase that made its way to the Supreme Court, because sometimes the things that make America great also make it the worst.

Area man Charles A. Syrus wrote a song in support of the Oklahoma City Thunder back in 2007, as the then-Seattle SuperSonics were readying their southeast move. It reportedly included such pithy, original phrases as, "Let's go, Thunder." As the Thunder became a thing, that phrasing — the likes of which had never before been seen or uttered anywhere, one would suspect — became an integral part of supporting the club, appearing on T-shirts, on signs, in chants ... heck, everywhere, it seemed!

This, of course, left Syrus no choice but to seek compensation for the fruits of his ceaseless and immeasurable mind labors, so he filed suit against the Thunder's owners — Clay Bennett was the named defendant in the complaint — seeking somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of the team's "net gross." The argument? That any signage, clothing and cheers used by Oklahoma City's fans, cheerleaders and mascot that included the phrases "Go Thunder" or "Let's Go Thunder" infringed on Syrus' copyright, since he had totally made those things up out of thin air and whole cloth using his own innate and unique brilliance.