To the chagrin of every non-Dunkin’ drinker, last year’s Boston Celtics were one of the most impressive teams in NBA history. For eight uninterrupted months, they pummeled any and all comers to a practically unprecedented degree. Their +11.6 regular season net rating was the third best of all-time, while their +10.9 mark in the postseason was sixth. Their approach was built on a foundation of cynical nerd-ball, but they played so gracefully that analytics started to feel like intuition. As they chased down their league-best 18th title, the Celtics faced just one serious question before parading through the town: whose duck boat are we gonna take?
Yet, Boston’s stars never really got to bask in the championship afterglow. Snubbed from Team USA, Jaylen Brown spent a large chunk of his summer seething and posting; Jayson Tatum—ignominiously benched during the Olympics to the point that his mom got mad—probably wished he were snubbed too. To a degree, Brown and especially Tatum are victims of Boston’s overwhelming success. On a team this loaded, victory feels like a birthright. But with the rest of the East rapidly building up around them and the Thunder and Timberwolves looming out West, the Celtics’ hopes of repeating depend on whether Tatum can become as good as his pedigree implies that he is.
From a purely Basketball Reference point of view, Tatum is just about as good as any 26 year-old has ever been. In just seven seasons, he’s compiled a Hall of Fame-level resumé. With All-NBA first-team nods in each of the last three years, he’s already equaled the total of Bill Russell and surpassed inner-sanctum Celtics legends like Paul Pierce and Dave Cowens; his 2,711 postseason points are the most that any player has ever scored through their age-25 season. With each passing year, he seems to get better, evolving from a unidimensional scorer into an excellent defender and legitimate all-around force. At this pace, he’ll probably rank as one of the 20 or 30 best players of all-time by the time he retires.
On a moment-by-moment level, though, Tatum’s standing is a little fuzzier, primarily because he can’t quite produce the same on-court magic that the other top players can. Watching him is like watching interest accrue: he’s a perfectly adequate bucket-getter who can pump out gaudy point totals by spinning above-average volume into slightly above-average efficiency. Whereas the league’s best players navigate the court in novel ways, Tatum has a more limited imagination: he has moves, but he can’t dance; he can get in his bag, but he’ll probably underpack. When he hoists his familiar side-step threes or mid-range turnarounds, he looks like a 2K avatar settling into its programmed animations.
Most of all, he has a fatal lack of aura. If an objectively less good player like Anthony Edwards can surf a wave of charisma past any criticisms, Tatum’s shortcomings are magnified by his stiff awkwardness. Even during the biggest moments of his career (winning a title, out-dueling Giannis Antetokounmpo in Game 7 of a playoff series), he has an unfortunate habit of making his cringey antics, not his accomplishments, the center of attention.
In particular, Tatum practices a performative, overly reverent version of the Mamba Mentality. He wears the shirts Kobe wore and poses the way that Kobe posed. Like the canned humor of a Marvel movie, he confuses merely winking at something and actually embodying it. He says he Wants It More, without really demonstrating how much more he wants it; he mires himself in needlessly difficult shots because he feels like he should.
Whether he realizes it or not, Tatum has more in common with LeBron than he does with Kobe. Beyond his shot-making or doggedness, Tatum’s genius lies in his physicality. His body is essentially the perfect size and shape to play basketball—he’s big without being lumbering, strong without sacrificing any flexibility. Despite averaging nearly 28 points per game over the last four years, Tatum is arguably just as good defensively as he is with the ball in his hands. In the Finals, he tamed the Mavericks’ offense by guarding their centers, allowing the Celtics to switch against Dallas’ main pick-and-roll pairings without ceding a mismatch to Luka Doncic or Kyrie Irving.
To wit, Tatum is among the league’s best slashers, shooting 57 percent on drives (the fifth best mark amongst the 67 players who drive more than nine times per game). During the playoffs, he had his best games when he simplified approach and used his innate unguardability heading towards the rim to create shots for his teammates, sucking in help defenders and then spraying the ball to Boston’s shooters. In his three best games in the playoffs by Game Score, Tatum averaged 9.3 assists; in his three worst, he averaged just 4.3.
In this sense, Tatum is at his best when he leans on his gifts rather than seeming ashamed of them; there’s a certain irony in the fact that Kobe’s fundamental Kobe-ness stemmed from a need to compensate for not having the natural gifts that Tatum does.
As such, Tatum’s ability to level up hinges on his ability to transcend his greatest influence. Boston won last year’s title because they were finally deep and talented enough to ride out the roughest aspects of Tatum’s Mamba Mentality cosplay. For them to win again this year, they’ll need him to shed his skin.