Steve Clifford had a plan.
The Hornets head coach didn’t want Jayson Tatum to be the guy who beat them. He ordered his players to blitz and take the ball out of Tatum’s hands. And actually, they accomplished that goal. The problem is, Tatum still beat the Hornets in other ways.
“Teams are going to try their best to make sure that (you) don't get off. And when that happens, just make the right play, even if that's for somebody else,” Marcus Smart said of his teammate. “He did that constantly, over and over and over again tonight. And as you can see from it, the basketball found right back to him, and he was in a rhythm. He was rewarded for playing the right way, and that's how it goes.”
There's something sort of philosophical behind Tatum’s 51-point performance against the Hornets in the opener of the NBA’s big MLK Day schedule. Tatum didn’t spend a lot of time looking for his own offense, but it turned out that the less of it he searched for, the more of it he found.
“As you grow as a player, you have to understand that other people get paid a lot of money to shut you down, and you gotta really work at understanding what the defense is doing,” Joe Mazzulla said. “You have to see adjustments. And so he's worked tremendously hard at understanding how defenses are guarding him. And then what the coverage solution is for each defense.”
The box score might seem to tell a story of Tatum simply getting hot in front of a North Carolina crowd full of Celtics and Duke University jerseys that make him feel comfortable. He walked off the court with an absurd 80.4% effective field goal percentage, but he hit shots by accepting the options the game offered him rather than force his own offense. He looked like a man among boys against a bad Hornets defense, but his game looked effortless because his effort was channeled in the right places.
“Everybody was playing extremely unselfish and the ball was just finding guys,” Tatum said. “If I had space and a shot, I would take it. I was getting to the free-throw line. Guys were setting great screens. So, obviously, 51 is big, but we played as a team. And I think that's what's been really big for us, these six or seven games that we've been winning.”
Tatum’s game, in a way, mirrored this seven-game streak. Just like each play demanded a little something different out of Tatum and his teammates, each game has demanded something new from the Celtics. They’ve grinded out a couple, been carried by different players in a couple more, and rescued by the role players. Along the way, Boston has applied the lessons from their December swoon to rebuild a 4.5-game lead in the East.
Brooklyn’s run to the top has been repelled. Milwaukee is scuffling without Giannis Antetokounmpo. Philadelphia has barely gained any ground despite a turnaround.
The Celtics have learned to win just like Tatum and Jaylen Brown are learning to be elite players. Tatum used the lessons he’s been accumulating to make his 51 points in Charlotte look like he was playing 2K on the easy setting. Nothing that was thrown at him fazed him in the slightest. He got to where he needed to be without chasing it. Well, 48 points of it, anyway. The last three -- he wanted those.
“Honestly, the thing that was going through my mind, when I had 49 against the Heat earlier this season, I took a shot, and we got the ball back when it was like 50 seconds left,” Tatum explained. “And I remember I waved them off, I didn’t go get the ball.
“Jamal Crawford texted me after the game. He was like, ‘man, if you ever get close to 50, nobody's gonna remember time and score, they're just going to report if you got 50 or not. So in my mind, I was like, I scored 50 six or seven times before, so when Al go that rebound and I was going up the court, that's what was going through my mind. Jamal telling me when you’re that close to 50, go get it.”
Okay, so we won’t begrudge a man his history. He’s now scored 50 more often than anyone has in a Celtics uniform (and don’t come at with ‘Larry Bird would never’ because Larry did exactly that when he told Kevin McHale, after scoring 56 points, that he should have gone for 60. Bird went out a week and a half later and scored 60 himself). Tatum, at 24 years old, is piling up enough historical milestones that the conversation about his place among the greats will soon be had.
Climbing the list is a fair reward for a game well-played. Tatum earned his opportunity for one more shot to cross 50 because his other 22 shots were well-chosen and well-timed. His teammates needed him to play exactly how he played to continue this streak that has kept them on top of the NBA.
“Just ride the hot hand,” Smart said. “We all know when he gets hot, it's dangerous. So just give him the ball and get your hands ready because once he does get the movement going, he gets to shaking and raising and teams start doubling, he starts making passes. So you got to be ready, and then you just sit back and enjoy the show.”
