Picks 'n Pops: Muscles, milestones, & Mazzulla's greatest hits

Every week I gather some thoughts about the Celtics, the NBA, and beyond and dump them here. Because I sold all my stock in colored tape JUST before Celtics training camp.

- Jayson Tatum says his motivation is chasing Larry Bird, not little slights here or there, telling NBA TV “Larry Bird is the best Celtic to ever wear this uniform. That’s the guy that I’m chasing. And even if I fall short of that, if I aspire to be as great as he was, and even if you fall a little short, you had a hell of a career. My motivation is to chase the best players to ever play, the best players to ever wear a Celtic uniform.”

Tatum has a real chance at breaking the Celtics' all-time scoring record if he stays in Boston his whole career. Not only that, there's a best-case scenario for Tatum where he joins the 30,000-point club, which currently only includes LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Dirk Nowitzki, and Wilt Chamberlain. Kevin Durant will probably join them this season if he stays healthy.

That's a pretty exclusive group. It’s way too early to know if he can actually make it, but he has a shot. He can make things interesting. 

- Speaking of milestones, here are a few Celtics milestones to watch for this season. 

• Tatum is 148 points away from 12,000. He’s capable of scoring 2,000 points or more in a season, so he could jump all the way to 14,000 this year. He’s also 188 assists from 2,000. 

• Jrue Holiday is 264 points away from 16,000.

• A normal scoring season will get Jaylen Brown past 11,000 points. 

• Al Horford is 426 rebounds from 9,000. He had 413 last year so he’ll have to pick it up to reach that goal this season. 

• Derrick White is 296 assists from 2,000.

- Tatum’s jumper looks a little smoother.

He said he’d addressed some mechanical issues and, apparently, this is the result. I’ve never been a fan of his shooting form, but this little clip has me very encouraged. I like what I see here. I hope this sticks. 

- This exchange between Joe Mazzulla and Kristaps Porzingis, via ESPN, is another all-timer. 

On Friday, a jet-lagged Porzingis stepped into the Celtics' practice facility. He had just landed back from Europe. Soon after pushing open the door to the nearly all-glass building, he saw Mazzulla, already glistening in sweat, in midsession on one-legged squats, rehabbing a torn meniscus.

Seeing his center for the first time in months, Mazzulla stopped his workout to catch up.

"What do you think training camp should be? Easy or hard?" Mazzulla asked him.

Somewhere in the middle? Porzingis ventured.

"F--- no," Mazzulla said. "It should be super hard."

We have been blessed with the best of Joe Mazzulla madness this summer. This is like the old compilation records they sold on TV. 

Just send $29.99 to this random PO Box in Colorado to get …

… red dot on your forehead

… we’re not defending a championship, we’re attacking one

… a bunch of weird hieroglyphics on a basketball court

… swearing at Porzingis about how hard camp should be

AND MORE!

- The Celtics are trying every trick in the book to create an uncomfortable atmosphere during this first week of practice. The piped-in TD Garden music, crowd booing, coaches yelling and counting down … and that's just all the stuff we hear before they raise the curtain. 

- Jaylen Brown is jacked this year. 

“I think just the duration of the season, I put on some muscle coming back last year and it paid off for me just by being healthier, not having too many injuries, by protecting my ligaments and my joints,” he explained. “And then just having an extra gear when it came to the playoffs. I was able to still play 70 games, pick up guys full court, play both sides of the ball with intensity, and maintained it all the way through the playoffs, all the way through the finals. So I like that feeling, so just added to it and I did more to get myself in even better shape so I can be prepared for another late postseason run.”

- Last season, everyone was talking bout Denver being the team Boston should have been worried about. Turns out, they were. 

“People always ask me, when did you guys know you were going to win a championship?” Tatum said. “When Minnesota beat Denver, I felt like Denver was the only team that they matched up best with us. I thought that we were going to play Denver in the Finals and it was going to be a good one.”

That had to be quite a confidence boost when the Nuggets got bounced.

- The Mitchell Robinson injury hurts New York much more than the Porzingis injury hurts Boston. Robinson is critical to what they do and there are real questions about how they’ll make up for that loss. If Julius Randle is your answer at center, you’re gonna have some problems. 

- Neemias Queta is trying to extend his range out to the 3-point line. Boy wouldn’t that be a surprise development. 

- Firing Zach Lowe is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen.

- The WNBA’s Player’s Association put out a lengthy statement calling for journalist Christine Brennan to be disciplined by USA Today. 

It’s an incredible step in a sensitive issue ushered in by Caitlin Clark’s arrival in the league. Clark is already a megastar feeding the business interests of a lot of people. Brennan, who is working on a Clark book, is among them, and the accusation is that she’s fanning narratives that border on, or cross, racial and misogynistic lines.

Pushing a narrative that players are intentionally trying to hurt others, when the players themselves both agree there was no intent, is irresponsible. There is a segment of Clark fandom that is overzealous, and Carrington has felt the brunt of that on social media and in person. 

If someone tries to hurt Clark, then that's obviously a story. Trying to shoehorn an inadvertent play into that narrative is self-serving and it does put players at risk for abuse from fans. A journalist can’t but their own self-interests ahead of the truth. 

- Credit Clark for speaking out against the backlash:

- I’m not a big fan of Jelly Roll, but this was a pretty funny line.

- Happy trails, Derrick Rose, a starter on the all-time "What If" team. His first few seasons were incredible, but his ACL injury changed everything. 

- Also on the "What if" team: Grant Hill, Brandon Roy, Greg Oden, and Pete Maravich.

- Jaylen’s sneaker line is out, with pre-orders asking for $200 for the adult shoe and $70 for the kids. The kids shoe is on the affordable side, but the adult shoe reflects the higher cost of materials for what Brown is calling a high-performance sneaker. The move is not just to thumb his nose at the major shoe companies. 

“It would be great for it to be successful. But even if it's not, who cares? I'm just kind of tired of seeing the same old things,” he said. “Hopefully in the next 20 years, even if this isn't like super successful, that it sparks other athletes, other creators to have the courage to start to build stuff on their own. I plan on sharing my story, how much resources it took, the ins and outs of everything that I've gone through. Maybe turn it into a documentary or something like that. But honestly, just to be a catalyst to what I want the future to look like, more brands, more creativity, rather than these just major corporations just maintaining. That's what I want to see.”

Brown might struggle to break even early on in this venture, so this isn’t a play to snag market share. But who knows how things will go if NBA players try and like the shoe. If we see someone else in them, then maybe it’ll take off. 

Really, the most interesting aspect of all of this is that players now have the means to try stuff like this. Even if Larry Bird wanted to create his own shoe, he never had the money or influence to back this kind of venture. Jaylen does. It’s going to be an interesting path to follow. 

- Today’s Bing AI-generated image: No seriously, Jaylen Brown is jacked this year. 

- Here’s my latest podcast, if you’re bored