How does a team reintegrate a superstar into an enormously successful offensive structure with only about a month to go before the playoffs? The Boston Celtics are trying to figure that out now, and there’s not really a blueprint at their disposal.
The 1995 Chicago Bulls are the easiest parallel. They got Michael Jordan back from his baseball sojourn in March. But on a variety of levels, that was an easier lift. Jordan, unlike Jayson Tatum, returned to basketball largely healthy. The Bulls had spent that season hovering around .500, so they had less of an infrastructure to protect. This was, after all, Michael Jordan. You’d rather he have the ball than anyone else.
The circumstances in Boston are a bit more complicated. This was a 41-21 team upon Jayson Tatum’s return, one that boasted the NBA’s second-best offense. Jaylen Brown is having a career year, but just as critically, the entire supporting cast has punched above its weight. The Celtics were capable of winning the East without Tatum, but probably needed a higher celling to go toe-to-toe with whichever heavyweight emerges from the impending Western Conference bloodbath.
Tatum is their upside, but he’s not Jordan, especially as he figures out what his surgically repaired Achilles tendon is capable of. The Celtics don’t need a savior, and Tatum probably isn’t ready to be one. The Celtics needed a compromise, an All-Star talent who could complement what they were already doing without overwhelming it.
There’s going to be some push and pull on that front. Tatum came out guns blazing. Through two games, he’s averaging 21.3 field goal attempts per 36 minutes. That’d be a new career high, and it was to be expected. He’s figuring things out. So is the team. Fire away. The shots aren’t quite going in at the rate they typically have, but they’re not bogging down the offense, either. Tatum held the ball for 3.71 seconds per touch last season. In his debut on Friday, the only game for which tracking data is currently available, he was down to 2.64. The trend broadly held in Sunday’s win over Cleveland. He’s using possessions, but he’s not wasting them. He’s not stopping the ball. If anything, his presence has been felt most as he’s shared it.
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Passing was a weakness when Tatum got to the NBA. By last season, it had become a strength. He’s not a point guard-level distributor, but he’s well above-average as wing scorers go.
The name of the game for them is understanding their own gravity, and even if Tatum isn’t back to full strength yet, he knows well the sort of reactions he evokes in defenders. Take one of Boston’s first buckets on Sunday. Evan Mobley picks up Neemias Queta in transition, but his eyes are trained firmly on Tatum. That allows Queta to spring Derrick White off of Sam Merrill with a quick screen, and Tatum sells the drive enough to keep Mobley frozen near the nail. With Merrill stuck behind the screen, Tatum slips the ball to White with a wide-open lane ahead of him. Two easy points.
The Queta pairing is going to be powerful as the two adjust to one another. Tatum is used to playing with spacing bigs, not powerful screeners and rollers, but they’re figuring out their chemistry quickly. Boston’s first points on Friday came on a hand-off from Queta to Tatum. Cooper Flagg tries to chase Tatum over the screen, but Queta’s screen is strong enough to buy Tatum major runway. That forces Dwight Powell into a lose-lose drop. When he sees Powell hesitate, Queta zooms past him and Tatum hits him with the lob for a dunk.
Queta’s screening again set Tatum up early in the second quarter. This time, he springs Tatum from Naji Marshall. Moussa Cisse freezes this time, and Tatum bolts into the lane. Derrick White gets him the ball with a vacant lane, and when Brandon Williams rotates over from the corner, it’s an easy 3 for Sam Hauser.
Plays like these are going to be the foundation. Quick-decision making that leverages the mistakes and hard decisions all of his talent and basketball IQ forces. Tatum doesn’t have to force the hard stuff yet.
Just putting him on the floor creates easy points because defenses know how terrifying he can be. That manifests even more in transition. Boston doesn’t have a numbers advantage on this break, but it doesn’t need one. The team has Tatum and Brown. Max Christie sees what’s going wrong immediately and tries to communicate how open Brown is to P.J. Washington, who thought he was picking up Tatum in the cross-match. Of course he did. That’s Jayson Tatum, your instinct when you see him with the ball and you have no defense set behind you is to pick him up. So that’s what he does, and it creates an easy layup for Brown.
These are, again, not especially difficult plays. At his best, Tatum can and will create and make high-leverage, one-on-one looks. He’s tinkering with that stuff early on, but getting back there will be the final step. For now, the idea is to fit into what was already working. The Celtics have shooting everywhere. They have great decision-makers up and down the roster. They have a very different sort of weapon at center than Tatum is used to. The goal is to get him acquainted with all of that and let everyone else get used to the star they’ll now have at their disposal the rest of the way. It will be a balance.
And Tatum is by and large doing his part thus far to maintain it. He’s playing selflessly, turning the fear his presence induces in defenders into easy looks for everyone else. The harder stuff, the superstar stuff, is going to take time. Recapturing it will be a step-by-step process that starts here, with simple, winning basketball. There may not be a blueprint for what Boston is trying to do here, but Tatum and the Celtics are doing a good job writing one thus far.
