To most of us, a six-week honeymoon sounds like an eternity to celebrate. To Jayson Tatum, though, it must have felt like the 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-setting 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’d worked his whole life to achieve.
By the time he turned in on July 28, though, that soaring sensation was long gone. He’d spent the opening game of the 2024 Summer Olympics seated, watching the rest of Team USA take down Serbia — a DNP-CD draped in red, white and blue; his honeymoon in Paris over before it ever even started.
Two weeks later, Tatum came home from France with a second gold medal … and a whole mess of mixed emotions to sort through.
He’d just made his fifth consecutive All-Star appearance and earned his third straight All-NBA First Team selection; just led Boston in points, rebounds and assists en route to the championship; just become the sixth player ever to average 25 points, nine rebounds and five assists per game in a title run; just signed the largest contract in NBA history.
He’d also just gritted 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 sliver of slander sent his way on TV debate shows, podcasts and social media; just got unceremoniously dropped from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the pecking order, with grenade-throwing pundits proclaiming him not only outside of consideration to be 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 Jared Weiss of The Athletic in August. “I’ve learned to be like, ‘OK, that’s a part of it.’ You move on.”
This is what moving on looks like:
The Celtics enter Wednesday’s Eastern Conference finals rematch against the Pacers at 4-0 with far and away the NBA’s No. 1 offense, outscoring opponents by nearly 24 points per 100 possessions outside of garbage time, according to Cleaning the Glass. (And there’s been plenty of garbage time already — 16 minutes’ worth, even by CtG’s somewhat generous reckoning.) As was the case last season, there are many reasons for that, from the driving of Jaylen Brown to the clamping of Derrick White and Jrue Holiday to the flame-throwing of backup point guard Payton Pritchard.
And still, as was the case last season, the biggest reason is Tatum, 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-to-6 assist-to-turnover ratio — and looking an awful lot like a player ready to ascend to the sport’s most rarefied air.
Only 25 players in NBA history have made five All-Star teams and three All-NBA First Teams, won a championship and been 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’re eligible for enshrinement. At just 26 years old, the only thing keeping Tatum off of that list is an MVP trophy. So why not go after it?
“As a kid, you set a lot of goals for yourself. I’ve been very fortunate enough to check off 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 Bobby Manning of Celticsblog. “Saying that MVP is important to me is not in a way taking away from the success of our team. Every guy that’s ever won MVP has been on a championship-contending team.”
The defending attacking champion C’s certainly qualify as the latter, and Tatum has started 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 spearheading a 20-point blowout of the Wizards; he didn’t have to log a single fourth-quarter second in those first two outings.
He wasn’t able to cut out early against a spirited Pistons team … so he just went ahead and hung 37 more in 38 minutes, capped by a stepback dagger with 29 seconds left and the game-icing free throws. Even when his jumper wasn’t falling on Monday against the Bucks, Tatum found other ways to contribute, bodying up big men Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis down low, keeping the ball moving without forcing the action, and finishing a game-high plus-18 in an 11-point win.
“Dominating 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’s doing, as far as his shot-making and finding the shots that he wants to take that are best for him [and] that are best for our team. Rebounding at a high level on both ends of the floor. Defending at a high level and playmaking. … He has the ability to impact the game like that in 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 shiftier swingmen all the way up to 7-footers; consistently posting elite defensive rebounding rates for a forward; consistent upticks in mapping the floor, manipulating coverages and delivering the ball to teammates to put them in position to cook. Where he’s lagged behind MVP frontrunners like Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in recent years, though, has been in the glitzier elements: in cheffing it 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 factors in 2-point, 3-point and free-throw averages) north of .640, both of which would blow away his previous career highs. 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 15-for-27 (55.6%) in isolation, according to Synergy Sports, scoring a scorching 1.39 points per play after going one-on-one — the league’s best mark through the opening week. On plays where Tatum shoots directly 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 can’t 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 gaudy 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 rather than at the center of the frame.
This stellar start, though, at least presents another possibility: that a version of Tatum who continues trading in midrange Js for 3-point looks in keeping with the well-established tenets of Mazzullaball, continues cashing them at elevated frequency, and does so to the tune of career-best volume and efficiency on what is yet again the best team in the NBA might wind up with a case too compelling to dismiss.
“If you’re an MVP, you’re dominating, you’re efficient, you’re playing the right way and you’re impacting winning,” Tatum said last week. “You can do both.”
Right now, Tatum’s doing both, and the Celtics again look like the class of the NBA. If he keeps it up, and they run it back, the next honeymoon will last a hell of a lot longer.
