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Player Jayson Tatum

From the video: Tatum is hitting 49.4% of his threes as the pick and roll ballhandler.
 
Drew Hanlen is a pleasure to listen to. His part starts about halfway through. He deserves part of Tatum's salary and probably a share of our ACC title in 2017.
 
Vecenie's writeup on Tatum. Tatum is the #1 prospect on the #2 team in the prospect rankings.


1. Jayson Tatum, W | 22 years old | Two years, $17.7 million

2019-20 stats: 23.6 points, 7.1 rebounds, 2.9 assists, 1.4 steals, 0.9 blocks, 44.8/39.8/80.6


Tatum has quickly become one of the absolute best young players in the NBA. He’s a monster two-way wing who had already established himself as a future All-Star coming into the year, and then made that leap into stardom by the time the calendar rolled over to 2020.

Following a three-game losing streak, the Celtics returned to Boston on Jan. 11 and needed to regroup. At that point, it seems like the lightbulb turned on for Tatum and that he realized he needed to be the guy to lead the way on offense. He dropped 41 points that night in a 35-point victory against the Pelicans, and from there just looked like a totally different type of player.

Over his final 23 games before the hiatus, Tatum averaged 27.9 points, 7.3 rebounds and 3.1 assists. He hit 49 percent of his shots from the field, including 45.5 percent of the nearly eight 3-point attempts per game that he was taking. He became one of the absolute best offensive players in the league, a creative force who seemed to be morphing into the kind of guy who could carry Boston to multiple playoff series victories.



From mid-January moving forward, Tatum made more pull-up 3s than any other player in the NBA not named James Harden or Damian Lillard, somewhat re-shaping his game as an elite-level pull-up threat due to his adeptness with hesitation moves and crossovers into step-backs. Overall, that’s the most enormous part of his development this season.

Tatum went from being an average pull-up shooter to one of the absolute best high-usage pull-up shooters in the league. This year, among the 72 players in the NBA who took at least 150 pull-up jumpers, Tatum was the fifth-best, hitting them at a 53.1 effective field goal percentage. The only players ahead of him in pull-up efficiency this year are lead guard maestros Harden, Lillard, his teammate Walker, and Chris Paul. Oh yeah, and he did it while scoring 341 points on jumpers off the bounce in halfcourt settings, 13th-best in the league and only behind Kawhi Leonard among wings. Essentially, there is a very real case that Tatum has been the NBA’s most dangerous pull-up shooter on the wing this season, along with Leonard or Khris Middleton.

That has opened up the rest of his game. Because of the incredible pace and rhythm in Tatum’s dribble — where at any point he looks ready to step back and fire a jumper — defenders have to constantly be prepared for what he can bring. Much like the player below him that I’ll talk about momentarily, the former Duke forward has figured out how to downshift, survey the court and figure out how the defense is playing him.

His handle has gotten stronger. He was always strong with hesitation moves, but pausing and slowing down would often lead to contact, and Tatum wasn’t quite strong enough physically yet to embrace that contact, absorb it and continue creating. He entered the NBA at about 200 pounds, and has since gotten up to about 220. Those additional 20 pounds — of seemingly pure muscle — have made him really tough to bother. And because he has such experience with hesitation moves and has some real explosion into and out of crossovers, he’s a constant threat to push past defenders off the bounce to get to the rim.

Having said that, there are two final steps of Tatum’s ascension. The first will come when he becomes a better scorer at the basket. He’s largely a below-the-rim finisher and tries to utilize a variety of little extension finger rolls to get all the way there. He does most of his work with angles while he’s still on the ground, trying to open up little lanes around rim protectors through footwork. His go-to is the Eurostep, but he needs to differentiate his looks a bit more often.

Tatum hit just 51.7 percent of his halfcourt attempts at the rim, which is well-below-average mark this year. He tried to work on a little series of floaters and runners before getting there, but the results have been mixed. He made just 28.6 percent of such shots this year, according to Synergy, which was third-worst out of the 72 players to take at least 50 such shots. Still, I actually think this is probably the right move for Tatum in regard to his long-term future. He needs to have multiple ways to score at the basket and once he enters the lane.

Second, Tatum’s passing ability is fine, it’s not great. On the move, I think he actually does pretty well hitting drop-off passes to guys around the rim, and he’s unselfish and smart when it comes to reversing the ball along the perimeter. He’s not a ball-stopper like someone like Brandon Ingram on the wing. But he’s also still trying to figure out what do in some help situations. Particularly, Tatum struggles with double teams and traps out of pick-and-rolls. If you send multiple guys at him and force him to stop his momentum, he can be slowed down. Sometimes, guys see things but can’t make passes. Other times, guys can make the passes, but don’t have the vision to see them. To me, Tatum’s issue is the former. He knows where to pass the ball when the double or the help comes, but he just doesn’t always have the live-dribble passing ability to hit those guys. It takes him a second to gather the ball and then make the pass. The good news is that this is a skill issue, not a basketball IQ issue. Skills can be improved. Feel for the game is often inherent. I don’t think Tatum is about to morph into LeBron James any time soon as a passer, but I’d anticipate that he starts figuring out how to hit his teammates soon.

Even if you’re of the belief that Tatum’s 2020 surge was a mirage on some level and would prefer to take his full season numbers, only four other players since 1970 have averaged 23 points, seven rebounds and 2.9 assists on a 56 true-shooting percentage or higher by the time they’re 22 years old. Those players are LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Chris Webber, and Marques Johnson. If you’d prefer to include players to have done this within their first three seasons, the list adds Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson, Charles Barkley, Walt Bellamy, Connie Hawkins and Joel Embiid — all of whom are either Hall of Famers or guys I would expect to be Hall of Famers in the future. That’s the track Tatum is on.

All of this is before we get to the defensive end, too. Tatum is good on the ball, but where he thrives is being disruptive away from it. His anticipation is ridiculous and he’s drastically improved his prep work in making sure he’s constantly in the right position in the gaps. His length is a real threat all over the court. If you make anything resembling a lazy pass in his vicinity, he’s going to snatch it away. He finished seventh among wings in deflections per game, and second among wings in loose balls recovered. As an on-ball defender, Tatum is good with his footwork and is switchable, but whereas Brown excels guarding down the lineup, Tatum is far better dealing with opposing wings. I don’t know that I’d call him an elite on-ball defender, but he’s a darn-near elite off-ball defender and uses his length well. He can bodied up still at times, but he’s great at using his feet to mirror and defend opposing wings when they don’t try to take him down low. And even when he does get taken down there, he’s much better now because of the added weight. I don’t think I’d quite have Tatum on my All-Defense team, but he should probably get votes at the forward position this year.

Overall, Tatum is one of the five best prospects in the NBA following his leap. As mentioned above, he’s literally on a Hall of Fame trajectory. He needs the leap he showed in 2020 to become who he is to actually achieve that, but he’s on the pathway. The Celtics are in great hands, and have a genuine building block for the future to where it’s in the ballpark he could be someone that is the best player on a title team by the time he’s 27 or so — especially given how valuable two-way wings are.
 

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