LA Clippers veteran Rajon Rondo gifts his teammates cookies along with hoops knowledge
By Yaron Weitzman
FOX Sports NBA Writer
In March, about an hour before the 2021 trade deadline, the LA Clippers swung a deal with the Atlanta Hawks for veteran point guard Rajon Rondo.
Gearing up for a playoff run, the Clippers believed Rondo’s passing skills, basketball IQ and attitude could help energize and organize the group.
"He's fiery, that's what we need," coach Tyronn Lue told reporters at the time. "He’s tough. He understands the game."
After the trade, Rondo, 35, appeared in 18 regular-season games for the Clippers. He averaged 7.6 points and 5.8 assists in just over 20 minutes per game and the team won 12 of those contests.
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But Rondo hasn’t just delivered goods to his new teammates on the floor. In fact, after not playing a single minute against the Utah Jazz in Games 2 or 3 of the Western Conference semifinals — the Clippers trail Utah 2-1 in the series — he might be delivering more off the court, and not just by sharing insight that only a two-time NBA champion could possess.
Rondo, it turns out, also has a custom of bringing homemade chocolate chip cookies on team flights and dishing them out.
Rondo started this tradition during the 2018-2019 season. He’d just signed as a free agent with the Los Angeles Lakers. Upon moving to L.A. he hired Jillana Miller – a local private chef who’d cooked for various high-end clients and whose father had cooked for Rondo – to work for him full time. One of Miller’s specialties was chocolate chip cookies. She baked them for Rondo’s children. One day he snuck a bite.
"He said he loved them," Miller recalled in a phone interview. "He told me he wanted to share them with his teammates."
NBA team flights have long been a venue for communal eating. Rookies are often tasked with bringing donuts or, if they play for the Sixers, picking up Chick-fil-a for the entire team. Some veterans play along, too. Rondo in the past enjoyed bringing whatever leftovers his chefs had lying around.
"But cookies were a lot easier and could please everyone," he told me in January 2020. "If I don’t bring them, I get all these crazy faces from people and they yell, ‘Where are the cookies?’"
When Rondo was with the Lakers, forward Kyle Kuzma was one of his top customers. "They’re the best cookies I’ve ever had," he told me. "I usually have two or three each flight." But Kuzma had competition. Jared Dudley said that Rondo was bringing "like three cases every flight but I’ve only had a few because some of these guys are so greedy." Avery Bradley told me that a bunch of his teammates had started calling Danny Green the Cookie Monster because of his affinity for Rondo’s treats.
What none of the Lakers knew, though, was that Rondo was often the one doing the baking.
"Rondo’s a baker?" Dudley asked. "I can’t see Rondo as a baker."
He’d started taking cooking lessons with Miller that year, as he’d grown more nutrition-conscious. If he had time before road trips, he’d bake the cookies himself.
"He pays attention really well, he doesn’t get distracted, and he actually wants to learn," Miller said of Rondo, sounding like every basketball coach who has described him over the past two decades. "He wants to know the why and how."
The cookies are always baked the day of travel, whether it’s Miller or Rondo in the kitchen. They're soft and laced with milk chocolate, usually made by Guittard. Miller developed the recipe while at a previous job — cooking for Kobe Bryant and his family.
"They wanted chewy and no dark chocolate," she said. "It had to be milk chocolate all the way."
Before the Clippers trade, more than a year had passed since Rondo had last been able to hand out cookies. There was no baking in his Disney World hotel during last season’s NBA’s bubble (the Lakers were somehow able to overcome this loss and win the title) and the league’s COVID-19 protocols earlier this season prohibited players from sharing homemade food with teammates on flights.
But as the year inched along, those rules relaxed. The day before Rondo’s first road trip with the Clippers, Miller had already begun preparing her ingredients when he called out from the living room with a question: "Cookies tomorrow, right?"
Miller was excited, but also concerned. A worldwide cocoa shortage had forced her to switch chocolates. The new brand was a bit darker than she preferred. She worried Rondo’s new teammates wouldn’t be as smitten.
The day of the trip, she handed Rondo about 24 cookies, all packaged in black plastic containers. Afterward, she asked him what everyone had thought.
"He said they just crushed them all," Miller said. "And that they were expecting more on the next trip."
Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.
