On an evening when the Celtics have been down three starters and two rotation gamers, you’d have thought that Jayson Tatum would have the ball in his fingers all evening, take 30-plus photographs, and wish a monster recreation to drag out a win on the backend of a back-to-back.
And positive, scoring 35 factors, grabbing seven rebounds, and hitting 5-of-11 from behind the arc is taken into account a powerful outing, but it surely wasn’t precisely the heliocentric efficiency you might need anticipated.
“I feel that’s necessary. I feel that’s good,” head coach Joe Mazzulla mentioned after a query about Tatum got here on the finish of his postgame presser and reasonably than on the high. “I informed him after the sport, ‘You probably did your job. Your job was to attain 35 and to take a seat within the fourth quarter in a recreation like this,’ and he did it and it was nice. He discovered a terrific stability taking nice photographs and being tremendous aggressive within the first quarter. I believed his defensive exercise was simply nearly as good and once more, to take a seat right here and have him try this, and to be the final query of the evening, simply type of reveals how good he’s and what he does for us. He did his job and he was nice in it.”
Was he beginning possessions because the ball handler and spraying passes all around the ground like prime LeBron James? Not precisely.
On Boston’s first halfcourt possession, Tatum doesn’t even go away the leprechaun emblem whereas Derrick White comes off a Neemias Queta display screen and walks right into a three-pointer.
The NBC Sports activities Boston’s vast angle can’t even pull out far sufficient to incorporate Tatum within the body on this Baylor Scheierman drive.
We have seen this configuration earlier than. It is an typically used tactic on out-of-bounds performs to create more room on the ground and provides the gunner extra runway to realize velocity earlier than getting the ball.
Payton Pritchard softens up the protection right here with some probing penetration earlier than Neemias Queta fingers the ball off to Tatum close to midcourt. Then, it’s only a matter of the MVP candidate to worm and slither by the five-out protection for a layup.
“Joe at all times tells me, ‘Every evening is fixing a puzzle,’” Tatum mentioned after the sport. “Tonight seemed completely different, taking part in with completely different lineups, understanding that Nick Nurse and his workers do various things defensively, box-and-1, triangle-and-2, various things at you. Joe simply got here as much as me earlier than the sport and mentioned, ‘there’s a singular puzzle you bought to determine tonight. I sit up for seeing you try this.’ Not essentially scoring 35 and sit the fourth, however that works, too.”
As Mazzulla and Tatum and all people on the crew have confused all year long, profitable goes to look completely different each evening. To begin the homestand, it was Tatum and Jaylen Brown combining for 83 factors towards the Cavaliers. Pritchard and Derrick White hit 84 collectively towards the Path Blazers. And on an evening once you would have thought Tatum must take over, he was typically the farthest participant from the basket.
