So there I was, sitting in the media section at the TD Garden, watching the Celtics build a pretty big lead over the Miami Heat. As I typed notes, a young man (emphasis on young) plopped into an empty seat next to me and started yapping away.
His mind was clearly altered by something, and after a few separate interactions, I literally had to chase him away. He and his friends sprinted onto the concourse and I, nowhere near as young (or as light), stood on the stairs giving them the frowning of a lifetime.
Kids, right? Just a bunch of 20-somethings getting drunk or high at a game having a laugh at some old dude’s expense. Happens all the time.
It’s funny, though, that it happened 50 feet away from the court where guys who are only, probably, a few years older than them are trying to be mature leaders of a storied professional sports franchise.
We approach this subject from time to time with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, both young men in their 20’s with supreme athletic gifts and the good fortune to have been drafted by the same basketball team. We have wondered aloud, myself very much included, about whether they had the stuff it takes to be leaders of others.
We, as a collective whole, are not prone to waiting for the growth to happen. We are not, in general, patient with processes. We are certainly, in this age of jostling for social media positioning with our takes, going to have a difficult time quietly allowing for maturation.
And so Tatum and Brown have been subjected to loud criticism to go along with their loud praise. In each moment, we can argue that they deserved some measure of either, but the reality is that neither player is so fully formed that it would be fair to saddle them permanently with either opinion.
In the heat of the moment, all is fair in love and sports.
But it appears there is growth somewhere in the midst of a season where battle lines have been drawn based on our takes. It seems that Brown and Tatum are taking steps towards their final forms.
“You have to commit and be more focused than ever, game to game. Right now in our locker room, Jaylen is the one setting the tone at that,” Al Horford said after Boston’s win over Miami. “He’s really keeping everyone focused, telling us we need to be focused, need to be locked in. Need to prepare for the game, take care of the game-to-game type of thing. There’s a real sense of urgency in our group with that. We have a big challenge for Wednesday. Charlotte is playing really well. That’s going to be a big test for us.”
There are tests everywhere for this team. Each game is a test of where they are in their progression, how Ime Udoka is growing as a coach, the offense figuring out how to stop tripping over itself, and of the leadership of Tatum and Brown.
Sometimes they pass. Sometimes they fail. It seems like lately, though, Tatum and Brown have been scoring a bit higher.
“When we're going through walk-through, (Brown is) actually talking more, and that's why we've been asking, for him to get out of his comfort zone on that end, and he's been doing a really good job,” Marcus Smart said. “Saying all the right things he's in the film room, watching the film and making the right reads and calls and letting us know. So that's the progression, it’s something that he has to continue to progress with, and he’s doing a great job.”
Horford similarly praised Tatum before the Atlanta game, saying “JT was very vocal about that in our shootaround today in understanding that we needed to stay locked in and come out ready to play.”
Okay, so they still lost the Hawks game, and Tatum was a big reason why with his turnovers. Like I said, some tests go better than others. That's not to say that he wasn’t ready to play, it just means he had a bad game and fell back into some bad habits. He said as much afterward.
Still, this is a results-based business. The narrative was all but written for Tatum to be the star of a piece like this after Horford’s pregame quote, but they lost and he wasn’t great. So instead, that got filed away until the next chance to write about it, which was tonight.
Brown was one of the stars of the game for Boston, dropping a cool 29 points on 58% shooting. Both guys are progressing, but on this night it was Jaylen backing up his words, Boston getting a win, and unprompted mentions of his leadership that lead to follow-up questions about what it does for this team when Brown gets more vocal.
“It does a lot,” Smart said. “I mean, it's one thing for him to go out there, just do it with his play. But also to be able to see the game and be able to coach not only himself, us, and be able to call out things that he sees, as the player to develop in that end. So it helps not only himself, but it helps us as well, and we’re going to continue to encourage it.”
Who knows how far these guys can go with their progression. We can’t predict the future when it comes to the Jays being able to lead a team to a title with their play and their leadership. We all certainly have our takes. Ultimately, it’s the results that will dictate the final story.
The winners get to write history, and it won’t be until Boston wins a championship that we can give everything these guys have done proper context. Until then, we can only tell the story as it unfolds.
There's progress. That's good.
“He's came a long way,” Smart said of Brown. “Obviously, he still had some ways to go, but he's came a long way from that guy that just looks like he's running out there with his head cut off. And to actually (be) reading the game, calling out the game the right way, that's just only going to continue to make him better and his team better.”
