It takes a while in life to realize you don’t know as much as you think you know.
In that sense, we’re all pretty much the same. It doesn’t matter who you become or what you believe, when you were 19 years old, you thought you knew it all.
It’s a good thing our brains are wired to look backwards from time to time. More than just reminiscing, it’s a way to realize how far we’ve come and how much we’ve learned. We tend to do it at milestones like a birthday, an anniversary, or, for a select few, scoring your 10,000th NBA point.
“I was a baby,” Jayson Tatum recently said as he looked back to his rookie season in 2017. “Nineteen, 200 pounds on a good day. Kind of amazed when I saw how little I was that I started every game and I played significant minutes and I had an impact.”
It’s fitting that Tatum hit this milestone at the Barclays Center. That's where he was drafted and put on a Celtics hat; a hat he didn’t really want.
“I was ignorant when I got drafted, despite what I thought I knew,” Tatum said. “First of all, I didn't even wanna come cuz I didn't think I was gonna play … I didn't think I was good enough to be on that team.”
He started 80 games that season.
Tatum has grown, literally and figuratively, a lot over his years in the NBA. The skinny, baby-faced kid seems to be twice as wide and twice as wise as he enters his seventh season. For the first time in his career, we’re starting to see Tatum’s full repertoire. We’re seeing the three-level scoring, the passing and setting up his teammates, and the defense and rebounding.
For the first time in his basketball life, Tatum is going from someone capable of winning an MVP to someone who will likely be a frontrunner.
“He dedicates his life to it,” Joe Mazzulla said. “He doesn't miss days, he doesn't miss practices, games … (he wants) to be held to a high standard. When you have guys like that, that you can coach, you see what you get out of him. But it also allows you to bring the best out of everybody else.”
This Tatum is the culmination of every prior version of himself. Each year he has been challenged in some way, and each success and failure has led him to this place.
“It has been a long process,” Tatum said. “I've had to learn through the ups and downs, through my mistakes, late-game decisions or whatever it may be. Just growing pains, and playing enough games, being in enough playoff series you learn from those things.”
It was Julius Caesar who said “experience is the best teacher,” (actually, he said “Ut est rerum omnium magister usus,” because English hadn’t been invented yet) which shows how far back man understood that trying something and failing is the path to gaining knowledge and understanding. Even in the face of largely successful seasons, Tatum was failing, learning, and growing.
Add to that the experience of Paul Pierce and Sam Cassell, both of whom have poured their combined knowledge into him, and now Tatum is reaching a new peak.
Against Brooklyn, it was scoring nine of Boston’s 14 points in a game-deciding fourth quarter run that grew a one-point lead to 11. The Celtics weren’t perfect, but they didn’t have to be because Tatum was there to close the door.
“I'm glad he's on our side,” Jrue Holiday said. “I'm glad he's on my team. A scorer like him makes it look so easy. He kind of gets to a spot and can do anything, if it's in the paint, it’s in the mid-post, or it’s the three. Not only that, especially toward the end of the game, they started doubling him, he's making the right plays out of it, making the right pass, trusting his teammates.”
The playmaking is an integral part of the scoring because no one can leave their guy to double-team Tatum if they know he’s willing to pass it to someone. The trust in others will come back to him exponentially.
But ultimately, Tatum’s true gift is putting the ball in the basket. Tatum isn’t even 26 yet, so his next 10,000 points should come more quickly than the first. He’s at a point where scoring at least 2,000 a season is very likely (assuming he stays healthy), so he could reach 20,000 by 2028. He might sneak it in before his 30th birthday.
Then he’ll only have Larry Bird, Pierce, and John Havlicek ahead of him.
If Tatum sticks around in Boston, he could be the team’s all-time leading scorer by his 33-year-old.
“It definitely has gone by fast,” Tatum said. “I remember getting drafted in this building … 10,000 points sounds crazy to just think about. I always think about when I was a kid growing up with my mom, and saying I wanted to be in the NBA. While I may have thought I would be one of the best players, to actually do it is a surreal feeling. So just kind of living out my dream.”
At the level where Tatum exists at this moment, that dream will involve a lot more hardware and maybe a few free Duck Boat rides around Boston.
“I've really felt that connection with the city of Boston,” Tatum said. “My son was born in Boston, I bought my first house, my car. My mom lives in Boston. I've spent almost a third of my life here. So you really start to think about all those things and the relationships that I've built in the organization and people outside just in the city. You really started to feel like you're part of something.”