For most of us, a six-week honeymoon sounds like an eternity to celebrate. For Jayson Tatum, though, it must have felt like the blink of an eye.
Tatum went to bed on top of the world on June 18, drenched in champagne and smiling through cigar smoke after helping the Boston Celtics to a record-breaking 18th NBA title. Hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy for the first time represented a golden exclamation point marking a season for the ages – the culmination of everything he had worked for his entire life.
But by the time he walked in on July 28, that rising feeling was long gone. He had spent the opening match of the 2024 Summer Olympics sitting and watching the rest of Team USA beat Serbia – a DNP-CD decked out 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 lot of mixed emotions to sort through.
He had just made his fifth straight All-Star appearance and earned his third straight All-NBA First Team selection; just led Boston in points and rebounds And assists on the way to the championship; becoming just the sixth player ever to average 25 points, nine rebounds and five assists per game in a title run; just signed the biggest contract in NBA history.
He had also just endured one of the most decidedly cold snaps of his career, shooting 28.3% from 3-point range and going 0-for-16 on jumpers with Team USA during the playoffs; he has spent his summer seeing and hearing every last bit of slander thrown at him via TV debate shows, podcasts and social media; has just been unceremoniously dropped from the top of the heap to the bottom of the pecking order, with grenade throwers discounting him not only 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 it to go, right?” Tatum told The Athletic’s Jared Weiss in August. “I’ve learned to say, ‘Okay, that’s part of it.’ You continue.”
This is what moving on looks like:
The Celtics enter Wednesday’s Eastern Conference finals rematch against the Pacers at 4-0, with by far the NBA’s No. 1 offense, outscoring their opponents by nearly 24 points per 100 possessions outside of foul time, according to Cleaning the Glass. (And plenty of time has already been lost — 16 minutes, even by CtG’s somewhat generous calculation.) Like last season, there are many reasons for that, from pushing Jaylen Brown to pinning Derrick White and Jrue Holiday to flamethrowing from backup point guard Payton Pritchard.
And yet, just like last season, the biggest reason is Tatum, who got off to a torrid start: 28.5 points, 6.8 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game, shooting 62% on 2-pointers and 42% on 3s, with a 22-point score. to-6 assist-to-turnover ratio – and looks very much like a player ready to ascend into the sport’s most rarefied realm.
Only 25 players in NBA history have made five All-Star Teams and three All-NBA First Teams and won a championship And named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Twenty of those are already in the Hall of Fame. The other five – Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Nikola Jokić and Stephen Curry – will join them once they become eligible to be enshrined. The only thing keeping Tatum, just 26 years old, off that list is an MVP trophy. So why not go after it?
“As a child you set many goals for yourself. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to check off a lot of things that I wanted to accomplish, things that my favorite players accomplished,” Tatum said after the Celtics eliminated the Wizards last week, according to Bobby Manning of Celticsblog. “Saying that MVP is important to me does not in any way detract from the success of our team. Every guy who has ever won MVP has been on a championship team.”
The defend attacking champion C’s certainly qualifies as the latter, and Tatum has entered his eighth season, seemingly aiming to renew his candidacy for the former. He announced his presence with authority in a 37-point, 10-assist demolition of the Knicks on opening night before presiding over a 20-point blowout of the Wizards; he didn’t have to record a single fourth-quarter second in those first two appearances.
He wasn’t able to get an early takedown against a tough Pistons team… so he just went ahead and hung another 37 in 38 minutes, capped by a stepback dagger with 29 seconds left and the game-clinching free throws. Even when his jumper didn’t fall against the Bucks on Monday, Tatum found other ways to contribute, keeping big men Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis down, keeping the ball moving without forcing the action, and setting a game-high to finish plus-18 in an 11-point win.
“He dominates all facets 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 making shots and finding the shots he wants to make that are best for him [and] that are best for our team. Rebound at a high level on both ends of the floor. High-level defense and playmaking. … He has the ability to impact the game in different ways, and that should be the norm.
Tatum has long mastered the quieter components of those contributions: being able to slide across various defensive assignments, from smarter swingmen to 7-footers; consistently posting elite defensive rebounding numbers for a forward; consistent improvements in mapping the floor, manipulating coverages and delivering the ball to teammates to put them in position to cook. While in recent years he lagged behind MVP leaders such as Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, he found himself in the most glamorous elements: in stepping up himself, at high volume and high efficiency.
About that: Through four games, 66% of Tatum’s buckets have been unassisted, and he’s posting a true shooting percentage (which includes 2-point, 3-point and free-throw averages) north of .640, either of which would explode. his previous career highs gone. He leads the NBA in pull-up jumpers, making two-thirds of his pull-up 2s and 42% of his off-the-bounce triples.
He’s hitting 15-for-27 (55.6%) in isolation, according to Synergy Sports, and is scoring a scorching 1.39 points per game after going one-on-one – the league’s best mark during the opening week. On plays where Tatum shoots straight out of the pick-and-roll or passes to a teammate who does, Boston scores just under 1.39 points per possession — fourth-best among the 91 players who record at least 15 such plays.
Tatum can’t suddenly turn himself into a 6-foot-1, 280-pound walking mismatch. He cannot magically develop a level of court vision and game sense matched by only a handful of players in the history of the sport. It’s possible that, in light of the remarkably gaudy individual numbers of some of his peers, slightly diminished counting stats from a significantly better team with a handful of top-50 players will conspire to push Tatum to the fringes of the MVP conversation sooner. keep. then in the center of the frame.
However, this great start offers at least one other possibility: that a version of Tatum that continues to trade mid-range J’s for 3-points seems consistent with Mazzullaball’s established principles, continuing to cash them in with increased frequency, and doing so to the tune of career-best volume and efficiency for what is once again the best team in the NBA could end up with a case too compelling to dismiss.
“When you’re an MVP, you dominate, you’re efficient, you play the right way and you influence the win,” 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 repeat, the next honeymoon will last much longer.
