There are 48 minutes standing between Jayson Tatum and his first NBA championship, and whether it’s the next 48 minutes that convey that honor or some other 48 minutes within the next week, it’s the nearest thing to inevitable. And while he is showered by confetti and soon after bathing in champagne, his army of audaciously audible critics will be, almost certainly, searching their memories for another pro basketball star to malign.
That is the game in 2024.
Because he entered the league in 1960, Jerry West could lose nine times in the NBA Finals and still become The Logo, a revered figure in the sport even before he began ringing up championships by constructing the Showtime Lakers. A quarter-century later, Charles Barkley could build a career that ranks in the league’s top 35 in scoring and rebounding – without any of that adding up to a title – and receive not much more than some gentle needling about the absence of rings.
With the end of the NBA Finals series against Dallas looming and the Celtics holding a 3-0 lead, Tatum is nearing the end of his seventh season. He has been an All-Star five times, All-NBA at small forward four times and All-NBA first team three times. So it’s not as if his excellence is being ignored. He is earning more than $30 million a year, so it’s not as if he isn’t being compensated. The public price an NBA star pays for greatness, though, is more significant than in any other American sport.
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Perhaps this is what the NBA needs to be in order to flourish. With its current broadcast contracts soon to expire, the league is nearly finished with a series of new deals reportedly worth $76 billion over 11 years. That’s $6.9 billion per year, which is three times what they’re getting now.
The league appears to have grown to this stature largely as a majestic athletic competition, the best league in a sport the vast majority of Americans have played, but also as a soap opera in which the performances and personalities of even such transcendent stars as LeBron James and Kevin Durant, players who would have been canonized decades ago in every market but those of their rivals, constantly are examined for flaws and faults.
“We saw it after Game 4, people saying he’s not happy enough for Jaylen Brown” co-host Tommy Alter said on J.J. Redick’s The Old Man and the Three podcast, referencing the vote for Brown as the series MVP after the Celtics eliminated the Pacers. “They’re zooming in on his face and he’s not smiling enough.
“He seems like a guy like, he let’s his work do the talking. And he doesn’t need to be front and center all the time, and I wonder if that hurts him.”
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Tatum is a pleasant sort, but not an electric personality, so if he is to be part of this reality TV scenario, it mostly is going to be based on his performances. Since emerging as an All-Star in his third season, Tatum never has averaged fewer than 23.4 points, never shot worse than 45 percent from the field or 35 percent on threes, never grabbed fewer than 6.0 rebounds a game. His teams have appeared in five conference finals and are in their second NBA championship series. He also was one of two superstars who rescued the U.S. Olympic team at a time when many of their peers passed on the opportunity to play at the 2020 Games (in summer 2021). On a team of mostly elite role players, and with guard Damian Lillard stuck in a slump, it was Kevin Durant and Tatum who drove the Americans to gold, with Tatum scoring 19 points and grabbing 7 rebounds in a narrow victory against France.
This is what I knew about Tatum as a pro. I followed his development closely when he was an elite prospect who helped USA Basketball win the 2015 U19 World Cup before starting his senior year in high school and through his one season with the Duke Blue Devils.
I was blissfully unaware his time with the Celtics had devolved into national voices faulting him for his propensity to attempt fallaway jumpers, his sometimes iffy jumpshot and the Celtics’ inability to yet win a title while many in and around the Boston media defend him with stats and facts.
Like, when the Celtics opened this series at home and Tatum scored only 34 points in the two games combined, he was punished nationally for failing to lead the team in scoring. He’d been the subject of near-constant double- and triple-teams and chose to make the correct play instead of forcing action. The results were two Celtics victories, a combined plus-25 rating for Tatum’s time on court and a near triple-double in Game 2. He is averaging 6.2 assists in the 2024 playoffs, as if he were somebody’s point guard.
What ought to be the story of Jayson Tatum is how someone who is not freakishly dynamic (like Anthony Edwards), not freakishly skilled for his size (like Kevin Durant) and not a freakishly accurate shooter (like Steph Curry) has managed to build himself toward this degree of stardom.
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He is a 6-8 wing with a 32.5-inch vertical leap. That’s not going to get him into any Dominique Wilkins comparisons. He is a career 37.5 percent deep shooter who hits about three per game from that range, which is not what one might have expected from Ray Allen. And yet through force of skill and will, with the advantage of a 6-11 wingspan, Tatum has established himself as one of the NBA’s best players in an era when the competition is not merely nationwide, but worldwide.
And, in another 48 minutes or so, he will be a champion.
The ring will stand forever. The peace it’ll deliver, though, figures not to be as lasting.
