Bud, you can save this as a receipt if you want and maybe I’m just being overconfident but I just feel like we’ll eliminate Detroit if we get to the Conference Finals.

They won a bunch of 50-50 games on the Celtics and have never played the team when it was scoring reasonably well. This game was a rock fight for much of the evening. If Jayson is in harness, even at 75%, no one in the East worries me.

I’m not saying he’s going to average 27, but if he comes back with more than a month before the playoffs I expect him to ramp up to the point where he will be starting playoff games, especially in later rounds. If he comes back during the playoffs I doubt he will have an impact. All of the rumblings are that the former is more likely than the latter. This team is probably the 3rd best in the conference without him. Adding Tatum absolutely makes them a contender even if he isn’t averaging 27.

Wemby is on a minutes restriction. We just saw that when he played in the 4th quarter, he completely dominated the game. If Tatum were in there just for the last 5 minutes against Detroit, or for that matter against Indiana or Portland or Denver and San Antonio, the Celtics probably win all 5 of those games. A better defender, better rebounder, better spacer, better closer, better decoy than we currently have right now would have made all of the difference. We doesn’t need Tatum to be Giannis and carry the whole team, we need to be about 10% better, especially in close games, in order to very realistically match up well against every other team in the East. And Tatum can make the team 10% better even when not at full strength.