The Los Angeles Lakers will visit the Boston Celtics tonight in an NBA 2014 game that will live stream online free at 7:30 PM ET from TD Garden.
Rajon Rondo will be playing with the Celtics for the first time in nearly a year tonight. It should provide a jolt to Friday night's game against the Lakers in a matchup of storied franchises having dreadful seasons.
The Lakers being in Boston is generally a hot ticket, but that didn't seem to be the case this year with Kobe Bryant (knee) still out, the Celtics having disbanded the Big Three and these teams separated by a half-game for the league's fifth-worst record.
Rondo's return changes that. He last played Jan. 25 when he tore his ACL.
The four-time All-Star practiced with the Celtics (14-26) on Thursday morning, after which general manager Danny Ainge said he would play Friday "barring any setbacks."
"He'll probably be playing five minutes a quarter, approximately," Ainge said via the team's official Twitter feed. "Knowing Rondo, he'll probably complain about that."
The speedy point guard hinted Tuesday this game would mark his comeback, sending a tweet saying "29,233,380 secs" -- an apparent reference to the time between his knee surgery and Friday's tipoff.
Rondo was sent to the Maine Red Claws -- Boston's NBA Development League affiliate -- for a workout Wednesday afternoon but was recalled to the Celtics less than two hours later. He joined the team for warmups shortly before that night's matchup with Toronto and was in uniform on the bench for the game.
Coach Brad Stevens said using him wasn't an option even with the team short-handed from a trade earlier in the day, not to mention fans chanting "Rondo! Rondo!" down the stretch of a tight game.
"I think the community is excited, as it should be, and the players are excited as well," Stevens said of welcoming back Rondo, whose 10.2 assists per game since the start of 2008-09 is tops in the NBA.
"... He gets the ball to people better than anybody around. But I don't think we can expect him to be Game 7 Rajon Rondo."
With Boston having avoided its worst slide since 2007, Los Angeles now tries to do the same. The Lakers have lost 12 of 13 with a pair of six-game losing streaks, and they haven't had a longer one since dropping seven in a row March 2-15, 2007.
They've also lost seven straight away from home, having kicked off a seven-game trip with a 121-114 defeat in Phoenix on Wednesday.
Los Angeles (14-25) has given up an average of 120.7 points during its six-game skid.
"We're having trouble keeping up with athleticism in the open court and at the rim," coach Mike D'Antoni said. "... Defensively we have a hard time stopping people at the rim."
Driving to the rim is how Rondo likes to score, something that could benefit a Boston team shooting 40.8 percent over the last 10 games.
This is the first game between these teams, who met in the 2008 and 2010 NBA Finals, in which both entered with losing records since 2005-06 -- the season before Boston got Rondo.
He missed both matchups last season -- each team won on the other's home floor -- as did Pau Gasol, who is averaging 20.4 points and 10.9 rebounds over his last eight games.
The game will be broadcast live on the CSNN television network and live streamed online at https://www.stream2u.eu/sports/basketball.html
