Mavrelous wrote:Tatum is a very hard pill to swallow, he doesn't look like the best player eye test wise, his stats come up a bit short, but he repeatedly carried the Celtics into deep PO runs despite lots injuries and setbacks, his accomplishments year in year out has to be accounted for, his game also, fits any system on both ends, is a huge plus, he's really hard to rank, but I don't fault anyone rating him higher.
With Tatum, it's a mix of things.
On one hand, he's pretty good. His raw averages are impressive, and he shoulders a decent amount of offensive responsibility pretty well overall. He's an excellent defender, a very versatile player, and he can occupy different spots on offense off-ball, which helps when he's having an off-night.
But as we saw last postseason during the championship run, Boston was able to win while he was pretty bad at hitting his shots. He looked brutal against the Heat, but was crushing the boards and putting huge foul pressure on them. Basically couldn't hit a shot to save his life but he was still effective driving offense. And Miami was a top-5 D last year. But Brown and White picked up the slack and despite his ugly raw percentages, he was less than half a percent below playoff league average efficiency, which isn't bad against a D like that. He was a little better against the Cavs and the Pacers. His performance versus Indy was actually a little disappointing given how bad they were on D. He put up the volume, but he had some big stinkers in that series too. Boston was able to pretty much coast along, because they have so much talent and so much efficacy at either end.
And then he was putrid against Dallas for the first two games, weak in game 3, okay in game 5 and the only game where he was scoring efficiently was his 15-point performance in Game 4 when Dallas blew them out (and even in that, he was 4/10 from the floor and 6/6 at the line).
So he's a tough one to evaluate for me and I waffle a lot over where to rank him. Tatum is a contemporary guy; he spams a lot of 3s. When they don't drop, he looks bad. But he posts and he PnRs and he's got quickness and a handle and stuff. He's pretty adept and slithery. When he isn't chucking from 3, he looks much better. And he's been growing year after year as a passer, which is nice. It's also nice that he can get off-ball and let the other guys do their thing, use himself as a decoy, etc. That isn't a trivial thing.
I think he's overrated by some as a scorer, but he does basically everything else quite well, which starts to shape the narrative of his ability a little, too. He's quite a good rebounder, he's positionally versatile, he's an excellent defender, he can catch-and-shoot, not just take stepbacks. He can be the handler or the screener in the PnR. He posts. Like, there basically isn't a spot on the floor he can't be, which makes enabling everyone else around him easier. Very high portability, I'd imagine. He's been a solid +4.0 O-EPM type of guy for several years now, which is pretty good but not usually top-10 type of thing.
