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Rajon Rondo made plenty of history in the Boston Celtics’ 90-84 overtime win over the Atlanta Hawks.

Rondo became the first player in NBA history with at least 17 points, 14 rebounds, 12 assists and four steals in a playoff game, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Elias also tells us he’s the first player in NBA history to record a triple-double in a playoff game after missing his team’s previous game.

Rondo triple-doubles equal Celtics wins. In Rondo’s 20 career triple-doubles (13 in the regular season, seven in the playoffs), the Celtics have a 19-1 record. The lone loss came to the Chicago Bulls in the first round in 2009.

Including the regular season and playoffs, nobody has more triple-doubles than Rajon Rondo (20) since the start of the 2008-09 season.

Rondo’s seven career playoff triple-doubles are tied with LeBron James for the second-most among active players, trailing only Jason Kidd’s 11.

Rondo really steps his game up in the playoffs. He notches triple-doubles more than three times as often in the playoffs as he does in the regular season. He’s done so once every 34 games in the regular season, but once every 11 games in the playoffs.

Per Elias, Rondo’s seven triple-doubles in his first 75 playoff games is tied with Kidd for the fourth-most in NBA history. Only Magic Johnson (18), Wilt Chamberlain (8) and Oscar Robertson (8) had more in their first 75 playoff games.

Only five players in NBA history have more than Rondo's seven career playoff triple-doubles. Magic Johnson (30) is the all-time leader in that category.

Rondo has etched his name in playoff lore by joining an elite list of NBA all-time greats.

OTHER CELTICS NOTES FROM GAME 3
• Paul Pierce was 14-of-14 on free throw attempts. Only three times in the past 20 seasons has a Celtic made all of his free throws with at least 14 attempts, and it was Pierce each of those three times.

• Ray Allen came off the bench for the first time in a playoff game. He had started his first 110 career playoff games.

• The Celtics have won nine of their 10 playoff series against the Hawks, with the Hawks’ only series victory coming in the 1958 NBA Finals while the team was located in St. Louis. According to Elias, Boston’s .900 winning percentage in playoff series against the Hawks is the highest any team has over another in NBA history (minimum six series).

• Cornell guard Chris Wroblewski played against Jeremy Lin in Ivy League action and, like the rest of the galaxy, blown away by Lin's run with the Knicks. At HoopSpeak, Wroblewski tells Beckley Mason he had no inkling Lin could play with NBA-level talent: "I mean he could barely shake me or the other Cornell defenders, and we’re nowhere near NBA athletes. The other concerns I had included his inconsistent shooting and the fear that he wasn’t a true point guard and couldn’t guard NBA 2-guards."
• How guarding the Orlando Magic can produce all the anxieties of a standardized math test, from Benjamin Polk of A Wolf Among Wolves: "When their offense is really humming -- when the ball is moving inside-out and side-to-side, when they time their screens precisely -- it presents the defense with a series of ever more hopeless decisions, each one leading them closer to a doorstep dunk or a wide open three."
• Some Spurs fans would like to see Tiago Splitter, who ranks third among San Antonio's big men in minutes per game, get more burn. Andrew McNeill of 48 Minutes of Hell explains that Splitter's injury history provides Gregg Popovich plenty of reasons to go easy on the royal jelly.
• John Kay of the Financial Times takes a stab at debunking philosopher Robert Nozick's old Wilt Chamberlain case study as a way to discuss whether bankers make too much money.
• The Jeremy Lin story continues to carry momentum to strange places, including a discussion about whether Lin racks up assists because "East Asians tend to view scenes more holistically than westerners."
• During the summer of 1979, the Lakers went back and forth on Magic Johnson and Sidney Moncrief.
• MVP debates -- not an invention of the internet. Branson Wright of the Cleveland Plain Dealer tackles the very thorny 1961-62 MVP race between Oscar Robertson, Chamberlain and Bill Russell, who was given the award.
• A typical date with DeMarcus Cousins involves ... (h/t: Trey Kerby of The Basketball Jones)
• Kenneth Faried, hoops romantic.
• Carey Smith of Philadunkia catches up with the leader of a quirky, but spirited, grass-roots movement growing at the Wells Fargo Center during Sixers games. It's called "The Revolutionaries," and they wear funny outfits.

Tuesday night offered more evidence that whenever some incredible on-court feat leaves you asking "when is the last time an NBA player did this?,” the answer is often simpler than it seems. If it’s not Wilt Chamberlain, he's at least somewhere on the list.

LeBron James recorded 27 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds in the Miami Heat‘s 102-90 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday. James’ 32nd career triple-double came against a franchise whose uniform he wore for 619 games, a franchise he led to the 2007 NBA Finals, a franchise he was a member of when he won back-to-back NBA MVP Awards.

After the obvious questions of where James ranks among this season’s triple-double leaders (first, with four), where he ranks among active players in triple-doubles (second) and his team’s record when he has a triple-double (24-8), the following question was posed: “when was the last time a player recorded a triple-double against a team he won an MVP Award with?”

As you’ve undoubtedly figured out by now, the answer is Wilt Chamberlain. In fact, the Elias Sports Bureau tells us he’s the only other player to satisfy that criteria. But Wilt didn’t dominate a team he had previously won an MVP with just once. Chamberlain was traded from the San Francisco Warriors to the Philadelphia 76ers during the 1964-65 season, a move the Warriors would come to regret. On four separate occasions, Chamberlain posted a triple-double against the Warriors, with whom he won his first NBA MVP Award in 1960.

Despite LeBron’s historic effort, the Cavaliers beat the Heat by 12 to earn their first double-digit win this season. Every other team has at least four wins by 10 or more points. Should Cleveland not win one of its nine remaining games by double-digits, the Elias Sports Bureau says the Cavaliers would be just the second team ever to have fewer than two double-digit wins in a season. Cleveland would join the 1997-98 Toronto Raptors (one). It’s quite a drop-off from last season, when LeBron led the Cavaliers to 32 double-digit wins.

Elsewhere in the NBA on Tuesday:

• The Houston Rockets pulled within two games of the Memphis Grizzlies for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference with a 112-87 win over the New Jersey Nets. It was the Rockets' second 25-point win of the season and first in more than four months. Houston beat the Minnesota Timberwolves 120-94 on November 7.

• Kevin Durant scored 39 points to lead the Oklahoma City Thunder over the Golden State Warriors in overtime. It was the Thunder’s eighth overtime win this season, three more than any other team.

• The Sacramento Kings improve to 10-27 at home this season with a win vs the Phoenix Suns. Sacramento is the only franchise in the NBA this season with more road wins (11) than home wins (10).

Playing without Chris Bosh for the first time this season, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James combined to go 19-of-50 from the floor in the Miami Heat's 93-89 overtime home loss to the Atlanta Hawks. The 50 field goal attempts are the most that Wade and James have combined to take in a game this season.

James took a season-high 30 field goal attempts, but shot just 36.7 percent from the floor. It was the 26th time in his career that James attempted 30 field goals in a game; however, it was the third-worst shooting percentage of his career in a game in which he took at least 30 shots.

Without Bosh on the floor, James also hoisted a season-high 10 three-point field goals, connecting on just two. This season when Bosh is on the court, James has made 40.2 percent of his three-pointers, and just 29.9 percent when Bosh is not on the floor.

The Heat also missed Bosh in their half-court offense. Miami had been shooting a respectable 44.7 percent from the floor (including 49.3 percent by Bosh), but against the Hawks on Tuesday they shot just 34.8 percent (24-69).

One bright spot for the Heat was Joel Anthony. He grabbed a career-high 16 rebounds, including eight offensive, but he did not attempt a field goal.

Since the 1967-68 season, Anthony -- according to the Elias Sports Bureau -- is just the third player to grab at least 15 rebounds in a game without attempting a field goal. The others are Wilt Chamberlain (1967-68) and Dennis Rodman, who did it four different times.

The Heat, who have lost a season-high four straight games, are 0-2 at home in games that go into overtime, and 2-0 in road OT games.

Miami and Atlanta combined to miss 47 three-point attempts. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that ties an NBA single-game record done twice before, both in Knicks games (Nov. 25, 2008, vs. the Cavaliers and Feb. 11, 2009, at the Clippers).

Bobcats 83, Bulls 82
In the night's only other game, the Charlotte Bobcats beat the Chicago Bulls for the second time in the last seven days. In fact, the Bobcats' last two wins have come against the Bulls, and Chicago's last two losses have come against Charlotte.

The Bobcats won despite missing all 13 of their three-point field goal attempts. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Charlotte is only the fourth team since the three-point line was implemented prior to the 1979-80 season to win a game despite missing at least all 13 of its three-point field goal attempts.

• More good stuff on the positional revolution, this time from Jesse Blanchard of 48 Minutes of Hell. Blanchard writes that defensive roles are much harder to define than offensive ones, which makes reclassifying (or declassifying, so to speak) defensive positions a nearly impossible task. The more NBA basketball I watch and the more NBA people I speak with, the more convinced I've become that off-the-ball decision making composes at least 50 percent of a defender's grade. It's important to have wing players who can smother isolation scorers, big men who can bang down low and guys all over the floor who can defend the pick-and-roll, but the margins of the game are won and lost because of the quality and speed of rotations, recoveries and anticipation. That's going to be true irrespective of how we define or redefine what a point guard, power forward or center looks like.
• We've heard a lot about the Orlando Magic's "4 out/1 in" scheme over the past few seasons. Here's what it looks like.
• While we're on the topic of what constitutes a power forward, should Rudy Gay be spending time at the 4? Joshua Coleman of 3 Shades of Blue: "Team USA is apparently content to live with their lack of size in the traditional post position of PF by maximizing their talent and athleticism at those spots by playing Rudy Gay at the 4 with Andre Iguodala and Kevin Durant manning the SG and SF positions, respectively."
• An evocative piece by Bethlehem Shoals about his trip to the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame has two of my favorite things in one place -- basketball writing and travel writing. On seeing Wilt Chamberlain's jersey from the 100-point game in Hershey: "I couldn't help but stand, slack-jawed, for several minutes. I took in every detail of the fabric, trying to read the game's action, or Chamberlain's mood, through the patterns of sweat and scuffs. Most telling was the long blood stain across the back, where someone had evidently clawed the big man as he took the individual game past all acceptable limits."
• Dave of Blazers Edge: "So much attention gets paid to [Greg] Oden's physical struggles that his true potential Achilles' Heel gets overlooked. The mental and emotional aspects of the game and the league will be Oden's biggest bugaboos. After three years of substantial non-playing his connection to health, basketball, championship-level play, and teammates is fishing-line thin. The organization will have quite a task reeling in such a huge specimen on that fragile line. Greg is more used to rehabbing than playing. He's more used to trying to decide what movie to watch than watching film. Competition is absent, muscle memory faded, rhythm non-existent. How will he adjust to his renewed calling and the renewed expectations...expectations with which he was never comfortable in the first place?"
• Kevin Durant's first dispatch from Madrid: "I’m really looking forward to this whole experience. It should be a lot of fun. I’ve never been to Europe, never been to Spain, never been to Turkey or Greece. I’m looking forward to that and just being able to interact and be around some of the best players in the league. Guys like Rudy Gay, Iguodala, Rajon, Lamar…just to be with those guys and learn, it’s going to be pretty cool and it’s going to help me."
• Jeremy Wagner of Roundball Mining Company on Carmelo Anthony's lame-duck status in Denver: "Carmelo already lacks defensive intensity and is not known for restraint on offense when it comes to letting shots fly. How much worse will those characteristics be accentuated if Melo is longing to be somewhere else."
• Could a breakout season by Brook Lopez propel the Nets to the postseason?
• If you take a look at the Wins Produced metric, it turns out Jason Richardson and Jared Dudley (both still with Phoenix) were the Suns' biggest overperformers during the postseason and Amare Stoudemire and Leandro Barbosa (both no longer with the Suns) were the team's biggest underperformers.
• Matt Hubert of D-League Digest lays out five Nancy Lieberman storylines as she takes the reins as head coach of the Texas Legends. Hubert wonders if Lieberman will be the target of any chauvinistic abuse from fans.
• Scott Schroeder breaks down the 10 must-see D-League games in 2010-11.
• A slew of teams introduced small modifications to their jerseys on Monday. The Jazz returned to an old motif and won the day.
• Chris Paul: Big fan of Coca-Cola's Freestyle Fountain.
• The commercial realities of globalism disappoint Donyell Marshall.
• Ben Q. Rock of Orlando Pinstriped Post tweets: "Oh man, guys, do a search for '2010 nba rookie portraits' on Getty. Some incredible stuff up there."
• The cheapest seat in the house for the Heat's home opener will run you $185 plus service charges.
• There are few guys in the league more fun to talk shop with than Ryan Gomes. Throw Gomes on the list of "players most likely to coach." When it's all over, Gomes has his eyes set on the Providence College gig.

Should the Spurs rest Tim Duncan down the stretch and trust they can win playoff games on the road? Can the Celtics trust Rajon Rondo to nail shots from mid-range? Do Raptors fans still trust Bryan Colangelo to assemble a winner in Toronto? Take it on trust at the TrueHoop Network. 

Timothy Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell: "The issue before [Gregg] Popovich is whether or not he should give [Tim] Duncan some rest prior to the playoffs. From where I sit, the answer is an unqualified 'yes, please.' At a minimum, I'd like to see Duncan sit out one game apiece of the remaining three back-to-backs, but I suspect Popovich already intends to make this move. If that's the case, the Spurs should be more aggressive. They should look for opportunity to accomplish two objectives at once: to provide Drew Gooden with meaningful minutes and give Duncan time on the shelf. The Spurs play the Warriors, Hawks and Clippers this week.  That's the easiest remaining 3 game stretch of the season. Perhaps, Coach Popovich should make a go of it sans Duncan and [Manu] Ginobili. Maybe they only go 1-2 in those games and squander an opportunity of winning back the 1/2 game they just gave up to the Rockets. But that's better than entering the playoffs with a partial Duncan."

Zach Lowe of Celtics Hub: "Read that again: Ray Allen penetrated and kicked to Rajon Rondo for a jump shot.

This doesn't have to be an isolated incident; I've written before about Ray Allen's ability to create off the dribble because of the way defenders have to rush out at him in a panic ... I'm not saying Rajon Rondo has turned into Ray Allen or even that he could do so in his wildest dreams. I'm saying that Rondo has developed a serviceable jump shot, and that he's come a long way from the player the Knicks completely ignored in a defensive strategy that was (justifiably) touted at the time as one way to successfully defend Boston. Some team will probably try that again, and it might work. But I'm guessing it won't. And if that guess is right, the Celtics will go into the playoffs with four elite offensive players, not three."

Rob Mahoney of Hardwood Paroxysm: "The greatest moments in NCAA history are great tournament moments (or great team moments), not great Michael Jordan moments or Christian Laettner moments or Carmelo Anthony moments. Because the NBA at the very least creates the illusion of consistency and longevity ... the focus is on the players, who are an establishment unto themselves ... Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki, two players who never enrolled in one of America's fine collegiate institutions, revolutionized the power forward position forever. MJ redefined greatness not because of the system-imposed limits at North Carolina, but because of his sustained greatness in Chicago. Shaquille O'Neal and Wilt Chamberlain forced the game (and its rules) to change to specifically address their dominance at the pro level, not in college arenas. The most significant basketball change has and will always take place in the professional sphere. If not simply because the players are bigger, stronger, and outright better than their college counterparts, then because the ability to remain relevant for more than a few years allows players the proper avenue to demonstrate their brilliance."

THE FINAL WORD
Raptors Republic: A blueprint for recovery.
Knickerblogger: Actually, the Knicks have improved.
Hornets247: Rasual Butler -- proving reluctant bloggers wrong.

(Photos by Brian Babineau, Nathaniel S. Butler, Glenn James/NBAE via Getty Images)

A while ago, I decided to do a FOIA request of Wilt Chamberlain. The main reason I wanted to do it? Someone showed me this cool website which makes FOIA requests of dead people pretty easy. Chamberlain seemed like he was as likely as anyone to have an interesting FBI file.

It came in the mail yesterday. (And, I later learned, the whole thing was online the whole time.)

What you'll find as you wade through the 40+ pages, is that it's almost all about gambling, and while there are a lot of sources saying Chamberlain was a gambler, and the director of the FBI weighs in with memos more than once, there's no proof or corroboration, and the eventually the investigation is dropped. (In fact, throughout the files many anonymous sources are consulted saying they can not confirm the rumors of Chamberlain's various alleged misdeeds.)

It's really hard to know what all this means, if anything. Gambling has long had a hand in sports? Wilt Chamberlain was a problem gambler? The FBI (or their informants) had it out for an iconoclastic young black man?

Read it, and let me know your take.

I'm not the first person to write about this. For instance, The Smoking Gun has many of these same documents online in an easy-to-read manner. Here are some of the most interesting parts of those documents:

• Page 1 "[name removed] had advised on April 20, 1966 that Wilt Chamberlain is a very heavy gambler in basketball games in the NBA" and "it is a general opinion that Wilt has shaded points in the professional games that he is a part of and places bets on these shading situations through [name removed]."
• Page 2 discusses concerns of a possible fix of the November 2, 1966 game between the Celtics and Chamberlain's Philadelphia team.
• Page 3 is a document prepared on November 4, 1966, saying an unnamed informant has learned that Chamberlain had bet a large amount on a game to be played on November 5, 1966. (Philadelphia lost to Boston that day.)
• Page 4 tells about an unspecified game in which there was heavy gambling, and Chamberlain played very poorly with a "twisted knee."
• Page 6 cites an informant saying Chamberlain is thought to have bet on his own team, but not against his team, and not involving point shaving.
• Page 7 has a source saying Chamberlain bet on the Lakers to beat the Celtics in Game 6 of a playoff series.
• Page 8 says "it is noted that, during the spring of 1967, the Boston Office had developed information that Chamberlain [several words blacked out] the Boston Celtics were betting heavily on professional basketball."
• Page 11 is essentially a memo from Director Hoover saying he wants to know everything about this case.
• Pages 12+ are about a totally different incident, where Chamberlain was tired of airline delays and made some crack about shooting somebody, which got everyone all hopped up but ended up being nothing.

I got several more pages of documents, that are not on The Smoking Gun (but you can wade through a big PDF and see all of the documents I got, I think, on the FBI's website). Some highlights:

• It is noted that Chamberlain was in Las Vegas for a Caesar's Palace event on 7/2/1969. Another document notes Chamberlain's name on a list of guests who got complimentary stays at Caesar's in January 1968.
  
• Someone is cited having claimed that that Chamberlain bet on Philadelphia for the game on 11/18/1966 against the Chicago Bulls. Then it says "Additionally, [blacked out] told the informant that [blacked out] Boston Celtics, has bet [blacked out] on Baltimore for the Celtics game with Baltimore on November 18, 1966, at Boston." (For what it's worth, Boston won that game by a country mile, so if, as that appears, that's a tale of a Celtic betting against his team, he messed up.)
• In a massive sea of blacked out writing is the phrase "Chamberlain's basketball debts."
• Another memo notes that Chamberlain complained to reporters of a bad knee when his 76ers played in New York on February 10, 1968 and Philadelphia lost badly. He was quoted saying was unlikely to play the following night against St. Louis. St. Louis became the betting favorites, but then Chamberlain played one of his best games of the year and Philadelphia won by 22.