Joe Mazzulla earned himself a lot of capital with Jayson Tatum Sunday night in Utah.
With his coach on his side playing him 35 minutes in the All-Star game, Tatum was able to pile up 55 points on his way to the All-Star MVP -- an award named after his childhood hero Kobe Bryant.
“It's extremely special for me,” Tatum said. “My first All-Star Game was in Chicago in 2020 when they renamed the MVP after him. I remember telling myself that day that I've got to get one of those before I get done. To be able to wear my signature shoe today and break the record and take home this award of somebody that I idolized, it's a hell of a day.”
Let’s be clear about what we saw in Salt Lake City. That was barely basketball, so there will be no effusive praise here like there might have been in the past. The story of this game isn’t Tatum walking onto the court with the rest of the greats of today’s NBA and emerging as the king of them all. The game was not serious enough to rise to that.
We make the mistake of saying All-Star weekend is about the fans, but it’s not. It’s about the players. Fans want championships, not All-Star MVPs. I bet you can whip off every year Larry Bird won a title but do you remember what year he won his All-Star MVP?
“This weekend is supposed to be fun,” Tatum said. “This is supposed to recognize guys for how well they've played in the first half of the season. It's a huge honor to be here, not only for yourself, but for your family and friends, all the NBA legends that came before you.”
Whatever we used to think All-Star games were is probably not what they really are now. This is the most championship-obsessed we’ve been culturally and players know that. They're not going to jeopardize their chances of that by going too hard in an All-Star game.
This weekend was a chance for the NBA’s elite players to get together, have some fun, goof around on the court, and pump up their marketability. Tatum wanted to win the MVP because it’s amazingly cool to be an NBA All-Star game MVP. Also, he wanted to sell some sneakers.
“I told my coaches. I told my friends. They all knew I was going to wear my shoe today,” he said. “So I had a little more motivation to play well, right, in the debut of my signature shoe. I wanted to win MVP. I didn't think I would get 55, but that's icing on the cake.”
I don’t blame him for this one bit. We got one bad basketball game, but the guys on the floor got a ton of great Instagram content. All those alley-oops, deep 3-pointers, and highlight dunks will be shared over and over and over again. In a couple of days, the NBA is going to release the stats about how amazing their social channels are doing. We (and our kids, and their friends) are going to watch those videos a bunch, too.
And we’re going to love a lot of those videos. We got a fun few minutes of Tatum and Jaylen Brown going 1-on-1 where each guy got the best of the other. They’ve probably done it in practice a ton, but to do it on national TV was pretty cool for them.
"Going up against my brother Jayson, going back and forth, it was like nobody was in (the arena) at all, just me and him,” Brown said.
Like I said. This is for the players. Playing in this game gives them one weekend where the pressure is off and they can actually act like kids again as they play a kid’s game.
“I'm extremely grateful and blessed to be in this situation,” Tatum said. “I'm not too far removed from being a kid in St. Louis with essentially a ball and a dream and dreaming about these moments of being here. And living out that dream in reality is hard to describe. I try not to really think about the things I've accomplished. I never want to get complacent. I'm always chasing something, chasing more.
“But I thank God every day that I'm in this position that he surrounded me with great friends and family and put me in the right position and just try to have fun. Just remember what I'm doing it for.”
In a few days, the Celtics will be back at it, focused on the actual goal you care about. Tatum, the All-Star MVP, and Brown, the Team LeBron leading scorer (oh by the way he dropped 35 points of his own while wearing a cool-looking mask), will but the weekend behind them and resume the task of maintaining the best record in the NBA.
“Extremely happy for (Brown),” Tatum said. “We talked about it. Now it's go time. We have to be on the same page. We've got to have one common goal, and that's to win a championship. This was a good break for us mentally and physically, but it's time to get back to work.”
And when they do, Mazzulla can do it with some cards to play in his pocket. If there ever comes a time where he and Tatum get into a stalemate, Mazzulla can gently remind him of the 35 minutes he gave Tatum to get this hardware (don’t worry, it was very light lifting for Tatum). At the very least, Tatum knows Mazzulla has his back. When it came time to do something cool on a personal level, his coach was there for him to help make that happen. That means a lot to an NBA player.
These little things add up. Whether you think it was a crappy game or that young folks today have out-of-whack priorities, the reality is that Tatum and Brown had the best moments of the night, Mazzulla scored big points with his star, and everyone is coming home in one piece ready to make one final championship push.
Hell of a day, indeed.
And oh by the way. Bird won in 1982 if you didn’t already Google it. Don’t worry if you didn’t know. I had to Google it myself and I wrote a damn book on Celtics history.