The sooner Jayson Tatum can come to grips with what he’s not good at, the sooner he can either fix them or eliminate them from his game.
Late against the Jazz, Tatum pulled up for a quick two-for-one shot that missed. I understand the reasoning of planning for a quick shot there because getting a good look and hopefully hitting it puts the team in the spot to get one stop and then play the free throw game. If Utah answers, you get one more crack at it.
The issue is the type of shot they got.
“I thought we’d want no better shot than Jayson Tatum shooting an off-the-dribble wide open 3. I’ll take that a hundred times a game,” Joe Mazzulla said of Boston’s penultimate shot against the Jazz. “Jayson Tatum shooting and off the dribble 3, uncontested, is a great shot.”
Except that it’s not, and he hasn’t been for a while.
Tatum is shooting 30.8% on pull up 3-pointers since the All-Star break, and 29.1% this season. He shot 33.4% last season. The best of the best last year, like Klay Thompson, are in the mid-40% range. The good pull-up shooters are all around 40%. In the 20-21 season, Tatum shot 36%, and the year before that, 2019-20, was the last time he was actually good at that shot.
He’s still taking nearly five of them per game, though, which hasn’t really changed over the years.
Tatum does have to take some of those to keep the defense honest. Abandoning those completely becomes counterproductive, but Tatum should be a bit more judicious with those shots. The
Instead, Tatum should focus more on working off the ball to get his shots. He’s having a rough shooting year, hitting just 34.5% from deep (about 1.5% below league average), but he’s shooting 39.4% on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers.
He’s taking 9.4 3-pointers per game, a majority of those being pull-ups. If he were to focus on flipping just two of those shots from off-the-dribble to catch-and-shoot, at his current percentages on each shot, he’d be shooting 35.9% overall from 3.
So just by shooting the shot he’s better at shooting, he’d raise his percentage in an off year to the league average. It’s what he was doing back in November when Boston’s offense was off the charts. He shot 5.2 catch-and-shoot (at 42.3%) and 4.5 off-the-dribble (at 25.4%).
One thing that stood out against Utah, and it was highlighted a lot on the broadcast, is how great Tatum is when he catches it on the move.
The numbers are pretty stark: When Tatum has the ball less than two seconds, which would be a catch-and-shoot or a quick drive off the catch, he’s shooting 67%.4 on 2-pointers and 39.7% on 3-pointers. When he holds it between two and six seconds, he’s at 54.7%/29.9%. At six-plus seconds, he’s down to 42.2%/29.1%
The longer he holds it, the less likely he is to make a shot.
Per NBA tracking data, Tatum isolates 4.8 times per game, ninth-most in the NBA. His score frequency is 40.9%, which puts him in the 53rd percentile.
I’ll put it this way: When Marcus Smart isolates, the online discourse devolves into the most toxic, panicky, reactionary stuff you’ll ever see, and he also scores 40.9% of the time he does it.
Oh, and side note: Jaylen Brown is at a 43% finishing rate, which will help me finish my point later.
What’s worse about Tatum’s numbers is they're up from the 39.6% scoring frequency from last season, and that was up from 34.7% the previous season.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat myself now: Just because Tatum can catch the ball, drive, and score on people very effectively, it does not make him an isolation player. He is, has been, and will be, a bad isolation player. He will score sometimes (40.9% of the time, in fact), but that doesn’t make him good at it.
The numbers are pretty clear. Tatum starting off the ball and then catching it from someone else can lead to some great things. Tatum holding the ball, dribbling a bunch, and trying to go 1-on-1 or launch a 3-pointer off the dribble is not good offense.
In fact, as the Smart and Brown numbers show, it’s not good offense when anyone does it.
Mazzulla is a believer in the numbers, and the numbers are pretty clear once again. Tatum is at his best, as are the Celtics, when the ball is moving and they are passing more while dribbling less. Tatum and Brown are incredibly talented players who can destroy defenses compromised by ball and player movement. When they go 1-on-1, they will fail more than they succeed.
There are 10 games left for them to be reminded of this message. It’s time for Tatum to accept where he’s at his best and do that more often.