Hard lessons were learned over the course of six NBA Finals games, and by just about everyone on the team.
The toughest of them will likely be rattling around inside Jayson Tatum’s head for a while. Tatum, the team’s All-NBA player, winner of the Conference Finals MVP, and potential future NBA MVP candidate, found himself bottled up late in games. He was hounded into turnover after turnover and met at the rim to force misses. He shot 24 of 76 on 2-pointers, 31.6%, and was a -21 for the Finals.
Tatum was not right, and if you need one last bit of evidence, he shot 65.6% from the line in a year he shot 85.3% overall.
“I just told him to go on vacation. Go get some rest,” Brad Stevens said of his post-Finals conversation with Tatum. “This guy gave us everything he had. … that's part of the learning experience about getting to the point where you have a great idea about what it takes to get all the way through.”
A distraught Tatum acknowledged the mental challenge of winning a title in the immediate aftermath of Game 6.
“I think just our level of poise at times throughout this series and previous series. Myself included. Taking care of the ball, things like that,” he said. “But it's easy to look back and see all the things you could have done better. We tried. I know that for a fact.”
Trying is great, but doing is better, and it’s doing the things he does better than most that becomes Tatum’s greatest challenge.
Tatum is unique in his ascent to the top of the NBA. Most superstars have something to their game that makes it clear from the beginning that they're going to be something special. It’s a sort of wunderkind, bored child prodigy vibe where they don’t yet know how to fully function as an NBA player, but they do some things so spectacularly that it’s clear something good is coming.
Tatum never really had that kind of flair. He just kept getting better, taking steps in the right direction, and growing into his game (and his body). Now he’s here, a First-Team All-NBA guy who had a decidedly non-All-NBA Finals, heading into a summer full of accolades and accomplishments, but also questions about his abilities.
Where does he go from here?
I suppose the best answer to that begins with where he’s been, and that's been on the court for a lot of minutes over a shorter-than-average time. He just completed his fifth season in the NBA, and his last three were impacted, somehow, by COVID-19. The 2019-20 season was cut short, the 20-21 season started abnormally quickly, and after an Olympics run, and now this past season saw a league-wide outbreak that drew Joe Johnson out of retirement for a week.
Say what you want, but when things are this out of whack, it just makes the process of improving more awkward and difficult. The demands on today’s stars are higher and more intense, and a three-year stretch that takes players out of a natural rhythm of performance, rest, recovery, and preparation does no one involved any favors.
Which might be part of why Tatum’s season started and ended slowly but was pretty great in the middle. His horrid shooting slump and inability to finish at the rim to start the season coincided with Boston’s mediocre start to the season. And while the buy-in to Ime Udoka’s desired style of play was seen as a major reason for Boston’s turnaround, Tatum’s return to his normal self was a big help as well.
The second-half surge saw Tatum eliminate a lot of mid-range attempts while getting better at 2-pointers and paint finishes. After opening October with 18.8% of his 2-pointers coming from the mid-range, he dropped to a season-low of 3.7% in February and was in the single digits for all of the calendar year 2022. He finished the season making 65.8% of his shots within five feet, a number bogged down by 57% in November and 45% in October.
The issue is that after a high of 75% in March, he dropped back down to 57.3% for the playoffs, and 47.6% for the Finals.
That's not the kind of full circle anyone was looking for.
Tatum’s fade at the rim was partly because he faced defenses (a) geared specifically to stop him rather than a variety of regular season defenses trying to just play their best and (b) that were the absolute best in the league. Boston’s road to the Finals put them up against defenses ranked second (Golden State), fourth (Miami), and eleventh (Milwaukee, but they spent the season mostly without Brook Lopez. They were ranked first in the playoffs).
Still, Tatum is expected to rise above that and make teams pay anyway. Boston made Giannis Antetokounmpo’s life hell and he averaged nearly 34 points per game. Superstar talent is supposed to overcome defenses, even those geared to stop them.
This is Tatum’s next step, and doing the little things he needs in order to reach that next level is his priority.
Some of it is perfecting the simple things. For example, cleaning up his dribble to get it lower on his drives rather than leaving it hanging out where has less control. Also, playing off two feet and using his sizable shoulders and body to get to his spots, and to finish stronger.
But a lot of Tatum’s next step is going to come from within, by honing and harnessing skills that sometimes put him in bad positions. He needs to understand what being a hero is, and that it’s not simply willing himself to be better. It’s a game-long process of setting up a defense to bend to your whims, spending the early quarters lulling them into thinking one thing, and then exploiting that thought process later. It’s about quicker recognition of the other team’s gameplan, and rifling through his personal rolodex of moves and plays that can take advantage of it. It’s about knowing when the right play could mean two different things against the same defensive alignment at two different parts of the game.
Some people have that skill. Others learn it. Just because Beethoven wrote 9 Variations on a March when he was 12 doesn’t mean every great composer has to have a prepubescent masterpiece on his resume.
So just because other superstars and Hall of Famers have certain paths doesn’t mean Tatum doesn’t. At 24 years old, Tatum is still accumulating knowledge, and he got a lot of that in the NBA Finals. This was an entirely new experience for him, and the lessons he picked up are extensive and difficult.
Tatum’s summer may be spent in some tropical getaway where he and Deuce can take their breaks from the rigors of Boston Celtics celebrity. Tatum will rest whatever maladies he’s been dealing with and, eventually, come back to reality with his to-do list for the upcoming season. He’ll get with his trainers and post Instagram shots of swollen, mid-workout muscles just like everyone else.
But he won’t be able to post his biggest developments … if he makes them at all. We won’t know he’s made them until he takes the floor next season, because those are mostly mental. That's what separates the superstars from the rest of the basketball planet. That's what’s going to make him the best player on a championship team.