I’ll give Stephen A. Smith this. He can certainly drive a conversation.
“I got Jayson Tatum as the leading candidate for MVP,” he recently said. “Does winning matter? Does being the best player on the best team matter? I’d say it does.”
And we’re off to the races.
I’ve been asked that question a handful of times since he made this declaration. It’s been asked and answered on just about every other Celtics outlet over that timeframe as well. It was the subject of Abby Chin’s first hit during the Celtics-Bulls game.
Across the Celtics landscape, Stephen A’s words are being seen as a call to action; a bat signal energizing a Boston base to loudly wonder why the best player on the best team in the NBA isn’t the MVP frontrunner right now.
And then the Celtics played the Chicago Bulls and gave everyone the answer.
It’s not that this game was any kind of deciding factor. Tatum started the game off slowly, and how Boston fared certainly mirrored, to a degree, how he was playing. Boston blew their 16-point lead mostly after Tatum had checked back into the game in the first quarter. Boston went from up 13 to up eight heading into the second, and then down three heading into the half.
Tatum was -3 in the first half but +15 in the third quarter, which Boston won by 16. So the game went as he went, which is pretty normal. A team generally mirrors its best player.
At the same time, Boston’s 16-point first-quarter lead was squarely Derrick White’s doing. And Jaylen Brown single-handedly saved the Celtics from going down more than three heading into halftime. Once again, the strength of the Boston Celtics, and the true story of their season so far, is the strength in numbers that they show every night.
Is Tatum the best player on the best team? Yes. There's no denying that is an accurate statement. The Celtics are the best team in the league and Tatum is doing a little bit of everything for the Celtics. Still, reducing the MVP discussion to the best player/best team argument feels a bit dismissive of who the Celtics are and how they got to this point.
Interjecting an argument about an individual award flies in the face of what this team is trying to accomplish. The beauty of these Celtics is that the first quarter can belong to one guy, the second belongs to someone else, and so on throughout the game. And who that it is in every quarter can change from game to game. As Joe Mazzulla loves to say, success can look different every night, and that's where Boston shines.
“We’re trying to be the best team,” Tatum said after the win in Chicago. “It’s not just about me, because I’m going to need everybody down this stretch. We’re gonna need each other for what we’re trying to do, to try to win a championship.”
The argument I’m making feels troublesome because it starts to sound like I’m cutting Tatum down. It sounds like I’m arguing against him, which I’m not. He’s one of the NBA’s best and most popular players. He deserves to be part of the MVP conversation.
But it’s the “best player on the best team” argument that doesn’t sit well with me because that's always where the argument ends. Usually, that argument is grounded in the fact that the MVP candidate in question is clearly the driving force behind the team’s success. Jamal Murray is amazing in large part because he gets to play off Nikola Jokic.
Boston’s strength is that everyone makes everyone better. Everyone takes advantage of everyone’s strengths. Tatum is just the best of the bunch.
Maybe the real argument isn’t what Tatum is doing, it’s what he isn’t doing. Maybe the real value in what makes Tatum an MVP is that he can do what a lot of other guys do but he chooses not to.
“I know I can score 30 a night,” Tatum said. “But that's not necessarily what this team needs on a nightly basis. So taking that step back, in a sense, for us to be better. I've done everything but win a championship. … That's all I'm going to be judged on at this point in my career. Just doing what it takes to help us get to that point.”
Boston has plenty of firepower to win when Tatum isn’t at his best. They can endure his tough stretches and still build big leads because that's how this team has been constructed. Tatum can also focus on being a facilitator if that's that's what the game needs. What he doesn’t need to be, at least for right now, is the highest-usage, “everything runs through me” guy, be it by design or bad luck.
This is the beauty of where this Celtics team is right now. Tatum doesn’t have to do it all. The “best team” part of Stephen A. Smith’s argument is the best part of this team. It shouldn't be glossed over as part of an MVP argument because it takes too much credit away from too many guys who have made this season what it is.
The Celtics have strength in numbers, and that's how they're going to win it all.