With the season fast approaching, an NBA coach had some interesting advice for Celtics star Jayson Tatum.
“He should develop a hearing problem,” the coach told Heavy Sports, his sarcasm dripping from every cell phone tower as the call traveled from his Western Conference home.
Getting more to the point, he added, “I sure hope he’s not listening to any of this [expletive] out there.”
The excrement to which the coach refers is the nagging narrative, offered even by some who’ve played in the league, that Tatum was somehow less than himself this past spring while the Celtics were winning 16 of 19 postseason games and the 18th championship in franchise history.
Many pundits and fans alike were requesting and expecting more scoring, more offensive takeovers from someone voted first-team All-NBA the last three years. And even though Tatum’s points per game fell just from 26.9 in the 2023-24 regular season to 25.0 in the playoffs, the detractors point to shooting percentages that slipped from .471 to .427 overall and .376 to .283 on 3-pointers.
Jayson Tatum’s Numbers Do Not Tell Full Story
“But if you just look at numbers, you miss what was actually happening out there,” the coach said. “Defenses get more focused in the playoffs because you have time to gameplan for just one team, and they were really setting up to throw extra people at Tatum. They figured he’d just force his offense and not move the ball … but he did move it, and that was the key for Boston the whole way through.
“I mean, he had nine assists in the first half of the last game,” he added, referring to the Game 5 Finals clincher versus Dallas. “He was passing more in that series than he had in his whole career. He was playing well; he just didn’t make shots at a high clip.”
It’s important to interject here that the most criticism Tatum had gotten previously centered on him falling into isolation ruts where the Celtic offense stalls around him. The louder calls were for him to move the ball and take advantage of openings elsewhere caused by opponents congregating in his space.
“And then they don’t acknowledge it when he does it,” the coach said.
A front office source was singing a similar tune to Heavy, pointing out, as well, that Tatum lost the Finals MVP voting, 7-4, to mate Jaylen Brown. (The stated belief here is that they should have shared the award.)
“Tatum wasn’t doing so much with numbers, outside of the assists, but he was making the right plays — the plays he needed to make,” the rival exec said. “And for a guy like him, there’s more of a focus on scoring and maybe what he’s not doing there, but he was doing exactly what Boston needed him to do to win. The challenge is this: the people voting, they don’t see that stuff. They just freakin’ look at numbers, or one or two highlight plays might stick out, and that becomes the narrative of what people talk about. And I think commentators embellish the big plays, when it’s all the other little things — good and bad — that created that position. It’s about highlights.”
Celtics Have Released Some Pressure With Championship
One scout noted that Dallas tried to take something out of Tatum at the other end of the floor by forcing switches that had Luka Doncic trying to bully him, “the same way that he did that with (Jaden) McDaniels in Minnesota in the conference finals. But Tatum dealt with that and he did a lot of other stuff. His rebounding and passing were critical for Boston. That’s a different series without him doing that.”
Because of the success there, it’s now a different world for the Celtics. No longer are they the golfer that repeatedly got into contention but failed to win a major.
“Now there’s a little bit of pressure off,” said the coach. “Everybody on the team and outside knows that they can do it. There won’t be people going crazy after a two-game losing streak that they don’t know how to win games, which was ridiculous. It was good for them, and if they come with the same unselfish attitude this year, it’s going to be even tougher for the rest of us. If Tatum’s playing the way he did, I can tell you our defense against them is going to be different.”
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