Jayson Tatum and the team game

Sometimes I imagine what social media would’ve been like in the 60s. I can just see 60s talking heads knocking Sam Jones and John Havlicek because they weren’t “superstars” even as those two collected one ring after another. But the crazy thing is, they’d be right. Hondo and Sam weren’t superstars. They played a team sport as a team sport. If they had the best shot, they were going to take it. And if they didn’t, they didn’t.

They understood that there’s a difference between being a superstar—or even just a ‘star’—and being a great basketball player.

Of course, it was a lot easier to just put your head down and be great on the court with little regard to the outside noise back in the 60s because there wasn’t Twitter. There wasn’t social media, there wasn’t such a thing as “sports radio,” there weren’t all these platforms where people are paid to say outrageous things, mostly because talk is, quite literally, cheap and therefore a good return on investment.

There weren’t enormous sneaker deals hanging out there for players who stood apart, who accumulated gaudy stats.

And those players didn’t grow up in an environment that made basketball look like an individual sport.

Jayson Tatum did.

That’s why I think that his growth as a player has been apparent by the fact that he has not dominated the playoffs — at least not in the one stat that everyone pays attention to. However, he’s leading the team in assists during the playoffs, averaging 1.7 more assists per game than the next player on the list, Jrue Holiday.

In fact, Tatum’s regular season assist average has climbed every year he’s been in the league, both in absolute and per possession terms. He finished the regular season averaging 6.8 assists per 100 possessions. For this year’s playoffs, he’s averaging 7.9 assists per 100 possessions.

There’s a difference between Tatum’s career regular season assist numbers and his playoff assist numbers, though. His regular season numbers have steadily climbed, but his playoff numbers haven’t.

Tatum’s frustrating tendency to keep the ball and try to create even when he’s drawn a double team leaving another player on the team wide open has been the subject of no end of analysis by people who are paid to offer such analysis as well as folks on the internet who love to give that sort of stuff away for free.

The consensus is that Tatum is ‘not elite’ because he often gets bogged down by double teams. And I think that, early in his career and often enough, even recently, in the playoffs, he’s felt that pressure, even though as far as we know, it’s never come from the team. He’s felt the pressure to beat a double team and get those next two or three points all on his own.

Why?

Because passes aren’t highlights.

Nobody — well, except maybe Magic — ever got a shoe deal because of their passing.

Kids don’t stand on the playground court counting down “five … four … three …” before whipping a crisp pass to another kid for an open jumper.

But the shoe deals, the playground games, the highlight reals, none of that is basketball. It’s the trappings of basketball. It’s the sizzle that sells the steak.

Once you get on the court, on the big stage, under the bright lights, you’ve always got four other guys out there wearing the same shirt and the same shorts.

Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images

Back in the 60s, when there wasn’t all that sizzle, it was easier for guys to play the game the ‘right way,’ and yes, there is a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way.’ The ‘right way’ gives you your best chance of winning. It’s going to vary from place to place, era to era, and moment to moment, but unless you’re a guy like Kyrie Irving who has made a career out of scoring through double teams, the smart move when you find yourself surrounded by the other team is to find the open man.

And Hondo and Sam Jones knew what the right move was, and they didn’t have a saturated lifetime of exposure to individual highlights and individual celebration to overcome.

Tatum, like nearly every player in the NBA—certainly every NBA player who grew up in the States—has grown up around individual highlights and individual adulation, but we have concrete evidence that he’s learned and learning to ignore it when it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Tatum’s gotten past the sizzle and found the steak.

This bugs people. They don’t like seeing Tatum defer. It doesn’t fit their mold. It doesn’t matter if Tatum is surrounded by players who would be—or were—first options on other teams, passing the ball is a “beta” move unbecoming an “alpha” player.

This year, Tatum is 14th in assists per 100 possessions in the playoffs, trailing only Nikola Jokic among front court players. It’s a far cry from last year’s performance, when Tatum wrapped things up in the 28^th spot. Tatum’s averaging about two fewer field goal attempts per 100 possessions in the playoffs, but he’s also averaging one more assist per 100 possessions, which is actually a net gain in points for the team, given that Tatum’s field goal percentage, like most players with a high rate of three point attempts, is less than 50%.

Yeah, we’ve been told for years that this is a “stage” where superstars “rise to the occasion,” or words to that effect, but it’s usually in commercials designed to capture your eyeballs for a nice fat slate of advertisers.

The truth is nowhere near that reductive. Looking back at those 60s Celtics teams, who was the “superstar?” Certainly Russ was the team’s best known—and most controversial—player, but he wasn’t Wilt. It’s not his profile on the NBA logo. Russell was almost always the best player on the court, but he wasn’t cut from superstar cloth, once the ref tossed that ball in the air, all he cared about was winning.

It’s an attitude that some players are seemingly born with, while others acquire it after they’ve tasted defeat one time too many. And it’s an attitude that Jayson Tatum seems to have finally picked up. He knows he’s going to get a max contract. He’s got a nice little shoe deal going. He’s got the individual stuff covered. And what he wants now is something that he can only get as a teammate. The best things to come for Tatum are things he’ll need help getting.

The path to get them was blazed by Celtics teams that, somehow, despite having the greatest player of all time, despite having Hall of Famers coming off the bench, was still greater than the sum of its parts.