A star in his head
I believe Jayson Tatum is a super star in the NBA, as does many of the millions of NBA fans that go out and watch the Boston Celtics play proven by Tatum having one of the top selling jerseys in the league over the past few years. I also believe in his head Tatum genuinely believes that he is an NBA superstar too, I mean who wouldn’t after making 3 (soon to be 4) straight First Team All-NBA selections on top of 6 All-Star Appearances. There probably isn’t enough space here to describe just how good Tatum has been this early in his career, topping it off with his first championship last year. But despite all the success that would normally put a player in the best in the world conversations, for whatever reason Tatum has been largely ignored in MVP voting and when you think of the word superstar in the NBA it is usually reserved for the Top 3-5 players in the league and usually those are the guys that are every year competing for that MVP award.
For a lot of people this alone automatically discounts Tatum as a “true” superstar in the NBA but his accolades and accomplishments beg to differ, which is how we got to this point 2 games into a playoff series where they were largely favored and against a team that through 4 games in the regular season Tatum absolutely dominated but now are in a hole that can be largely blamed on him and the team not showing up in the last quarter of both games. This was supposed to be his moment to finally prove to everyone that yes, Jayson Tatum is one of the best players in the NBA today and is the best on most given nights in the playoffs but what we have got instead is mediocre stats that seem a far cry from the domination the Orlando Magic received just a week ago. Just look at his FGA over the last 5 games and you can paint a picture of what a confusing mess he has been over the 2 New York games.
In the first game it looked like he was trying to bury the Knicks with threes completely ignoring any attempt at trying to drive to the basket as seen by his 5 field goal attempts in the paint, while in game 2 there was a large overcorrection in his part attempting only 5 threes with most of his misses this time coming from within the painted area. Now compare this to his last 4 games against the Orlando Magic and you can see the difference alone just in the attempts he made and how consistent he was at getting around the court and taking whatever the defense was giving him.
Seeing all this the only thing that immediately comes to mind is why? Why were there so many threes and then a complete reversal of shots the next game out? I think it just boils down to the type of Superstar that Tatum wants to be. Look for example at the shot charts of his fellow NBA superstars below.
You can clearly see that both players have a distinct shot diet that they stick to regardless of the defense that they see with a large part of the differences game to game just being the slightly different looks that defense allows them to get. What’s shocking to me is how Tatum has seemingly bounced around between wanting to be Player A in Game 1 and Player B in Game 2.
These players being Stephen Curry and Lebron James’ shot charts respectively through 4 games in this year’s playoffs. Jayson Tatum in round 1 was a genuine superstar with a consistent recipe for scoring and playmaking that has worked for him all throughout this season but the Jayson Tatum that we have seen the past 2 games? This weird mishmash of bouncing around 2 completely different superstars that have defined the past decade of the sport is just a walking lowlight for us to see who he isn’t. It seems for a lot of fans they have yet to see a consistent playoff run where in every round he played he was Jayson Tatum and until then we’re stuck watching him choose on a nightly basis the type of superstar that he wants to be in his head and on the past few games it has just been a constant reminder of the stars that he is not. It’s a good start that he has acknowledged that he isn’t playing like himself but I just wanted to put in perspective how that actually looks like.