To most of us, a six-week honeymoon sounds like an eternity to celebrate. To Jayson Tatum, however, it must have felt like a blink of an eye.
Tatum went to bed on June 18 on top of the world, Champagne-soaked and smiling through cigar smoke after helping lead the Boston Celtics to a record 18th NBA title. Hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy for the first time represented a golden exclamation point punctuating a season for the ages – the culmination of everything he had worked his entire life to achieve.
By the time he turned around on July 28, however, that rising feeling was long gone. He spent the opening game of the 2024 Summer Olympics sitting, watching the rest of Team USA destroy Serbia – a DNP CD draped in red, white and blue; his honeymoon in Paris was over before it even began.
Two weeks later, Tatum came home from France with a second gold medal … and a whole mess of mixed emotions to sort out.
He just made his fifth consecutive All-Star appearance and earned his third straight All-NBA First Team selection; only led Boston in points, rebounds and assists on the way to the championship; just become the sixth player ever average 25 points, nine rebounds and five assists per game in title run; just signed the biggest contract in NBA history.
He also just screamed through one of the most pronounced cold snaps of his career, shooting 28.3% from 3-point range during the playoffs and going 0-for-16 on jumpers with Team USA; just spent his summer seeing and hearing every last bit of slander sent his way to television debate shows, podcasts and social media; has just been unceremoniously dropped from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the pecking order, with grenade-throwing pundits proclaiming him not only out of consideration as the best player in the NBA, but perhaps not even the best player on his own team. .
“I have two [gold medals] now, I have a championship, and everything doesn’t necessarily go the way you expect, right?” Tatum said Jared Weiss of The Athletic in August. “I learned to be like, ‘OK, that’s part of it.’ You move on.”
Here’s what moving on looks like:
The Celtics enter Wednesday’s Eastern Conference finals rematch against the Pacers at 4-0 with far the NBA’s number 1 offenseoutscoring opponents by nearly 24 points per 100 possessions out of garbage time, according to Cleaning the Glass. (And there was already a lot of waste time – 16 minutes’ is wortheven by CtG’s somewhat generous count.) As was the case last season, there are plenty of reasons for that, from Jaylen Brown’s drive to the cramping of Derrick White and Jrue Holiday to the flamethrowing of backup point guard Payton Pritchard.
And still, as was the case last season, the biggest reason is Tatum, due to a hot start – 28.5 points, 6.8 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game, shooting 62% on 2-pointers and 42% on 3-pointers, with 22 – to-6 assist-to-turnover ratio — and looks an awful lot like a player poised to ascend to the sport’s rarest air.
Only 25 players in NBA history have made five All-Star teams and three All-NBA First Teams, won a championship. and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Twenty of them are already in the Hall of Fame. The other five – Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Nikola Jokić and Stephen Curry – will join them the second they are eligible for enshrinement. At just 26 years old, the only thing keeping Tatum off that list is an MVP trophy. So why not follow it?
“As a child, you set a lot of goals for yourself. I was fortunate enough to check a lot of boxes of things that I wanted to accomplish, things that my favorite players accomplished,” Tatum said after the Celtics knocked off the Wizards last week, according to Celticsblog’s Bobby Manning. “Saying that MVP is important to me in no way takes away from the success of our team. Every guy that has ever won an MVP has been on a championship-contending team.”
The defending attacking champion The C’s certainly qualify as the latter, and Tatum began his eighth season seemingly intent on renewing his candidacy for the former. He announced his presence with authority in a 37-point, 10-assist, opening-night demolition of the Knicks before leading a 20-point blowout of the Wizards; he didn’t have to log a quarter of a second in those first two outings.
He couldn’t cut out early against a gutsy Pistons team … so he just went ahead and hung up 37 more in 38 minutes, capped by a walking dagger with 29 seconds left and the game-tying free throws. Even when his jumper didn’t fall Monday against the Bucks, Tatum found other ways to contribute, incorporating big men Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis down low, keeping the ball moving without forcing the action, and finishing with a game-high plus-18 in an 11-point win. .
“Dominating all aspects of the game,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said when asked what he expects from Tatum. “I think just his ability to do what he does as far as his shot-making and finding the shots he wants to make are best for him. [and] which are best for our team. Bouncing at a high level on both ends of the floor. High level defending and playmaking. … He has the ability to impact the game in so many different ways, and that should be the norm.”
Tatum has long nailed the quieter components of those contributions: being able to slide across different defensive assignments, from more shifty swingmen to 7-footers; constantly posting elite defensive rebound rates for forward; consistent ups in mapping the floor, manipulating coverages and delivering the ball to teammates to put them in position to cook. Where he fell behind MVP frontrunners like Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in recent years, however, was in the brighter elements: in cooking it. himself, at high volume and high efficiency.
About it: Through four games, 66% of Tatum’s buckets were unassistedand he posts a true shooting percentage (which takes into account 2-point, 3-point and free-throw averages) north of .640both of which would blow his previous career highs. He leads the NBA in pull-up jumpersmaking two thirds of his pull 2s and 42% of his off-the-bounce triples.
He is 15-for-27 (55.6%) in isolation, according Synergy Sportsscoring a scorching 1.39 points per game after going one-on-one – the league’s best mark through the opening week. On plays where Tatum shoots straight out of the pick-and-roll or passes to a teammate who does, Boston is scoring just under 1.39 points per possession — fourth-best among 91 players to log at least 15 such plays.
Tatum can’t suddenly make himself a 7-foot, 280-pound walking mismatch. He cannot magically develop a level of court vision and playmaking touch rivaled by no more than a handful of players in the history of the sport. It’s possible that, in the face of the remarkably eye-popping individual numbers of some of his peers, somewhat reduced counting stats on a significantly better team stocked with a handful of top-50 players will conspire to keep Tatum on the fringes of the MVP conversation instead. than in the center of the frame.
This stellar start, however, at least presents another possibility: that a version of Tatum who continues to trade in mid-range J’s for 3-pointers looks to conform to the well-established tenets of Mazzullaball, continues to cash them in at high frequency, and does so to the tune of career-best volume and efficiency on what is still the best team in the NBA could end up with a case too convincing to dismiss.
“If you’re an MVP, you’re dominant, you’re efficient, you play the right way and you affect winning,” Tatum said last week “You can do both.”
Right now, Tatum is doing both, and the Celtics are looking like the class of the NBA again. If he keeps it up, and they run it again, the next honeymoon will last a lot longer.
