On a night when the Celtics were down three starters and two rotation players, you would have thought that Jayson Tatum would have the ball in his hands all night, take 30-plus shots, and need a monster game to pull out a win on the backend of a back-to-back.
And sure, scoring 35 points, grabbing seven rebounds, and hitting 5-of-11 from behind the arc is considered a strong outing, but it wasn’t exactly the heliocentric performance you might have expected.
“I think that’s important. I think that’s good,” head coach Joe Mazzulla said after a question about Tatum came at the end of his postgame presser and rather than at the top. “I told him after the game, ‘You did your job. Your job was to score 35 and to sit in the fourth quarter in a game like this,’ and he did it and it was great. He found a great balance taking great shots and being super aggressive in the first quarter. I thought his defensive activity was just as good and again, to sit here and have him do that, and to be the last question of the night, just kind of shows how good he is and what he does for us. He did his job and he was great in it.”
Was he starting possessions as the ball handler and spraying passes all over the floor like prime LeBron James? Not exactly.
On Boston’s first halfcourt possession, Tatum doesn’t even leave the leprechaun logo while Derrick White comes off a Neemias Queta screen and walks into a three-pointer.
The NBC Sports Boston’s wide angle can’t even pull out far enough to include Tatum in the frame on this Baylor Scheierman drive.
We’ve seen this configuration before. It’s an often used tactic on out-of-bounds plays to create more space on the floor and give the gunner more runway to gain speed before getting the ball.
Payton Pritchard softens up the defense here with some probing penetration before Neemias Queta hands the ball off to Tatum near midcourt. Then, it’s just a matter of the MVP candidate to worm and slither through the five-out defense for a layup.
“Joe always tells me, ‘Each night is solving a puzzle,’” Tatum said after the game. “Tonight looked different, playing with different lineups, understanding that Nick Nurse and his staff do different things defensively, box-and-1, triangle-and-2, different things at you. Joe just came up to me before the game and said, ‘there’s a unique puzzle you got to figure out tonight. I look forward to seeing you do that.’ Not necessarily scoring 35 and sit the fourth, but that works, too.”
As Mazzulla and Tatum and everybody on the team have stressed throughout the year, winning is going to look different every night. To start the homestand, it was Tatum and Jaylen Brown combining for 83 points against the Cavaliers. Pritchard and Derrick White hit 84 together against the Trail Blazers. And on a night when you would have thought Tatum would have to take over, he was often the farthest player from the basket.
