tsherkin wrote:DarkAzcura wrote:You mentioned to another poster that you were surprised that all you hear about is his playoff failures. I agree with that poster. I have seen several people on this forum and elsewhere talk about Tatum as a playoff choker, even though he scored 40+ against the Bucks down 3-2 in the Bucks’ arena to push it to game 7. He also has the record for most points in a game 7.
He's had his ups and downs. It's a consequence of being so reliant upon his 3pt shot and having so little middle game.
People love to focus on the Finals as you did earlier, even though he was playing with a fractured wrist.
Yup, it's a fair mention.
In the end, the guy has had multiple years of success, and nowadays you hear about how stacked his teams are even though his impact stats are some of the best in the league. He’s about to make his third all NBA first team. Making 3 all NBA first teams is an incredible feat, to be honest.
Yeah, he's a good player. He probably shouldn't have made this many First Teams, tbh, but he's still quite good. I think part of the reason he receives a lot of feedback is that his offensive impact stats aren't as impressive as his peers at the top. He's a pretty good offensive player when his shot is falling and a very good defender, so that couples well together but it does present some issues. Again, baseline, very good player, so we're more talking pushback to "yeah, this dude's top 5" and so forth.
I agree that he is too reliant on the 3PT shot. This is probably where the whole Ime situation screwed the Celtics to some extent, because I feel like he was pushing him more into the high post, which is where Tatum’s game needs to get to to be more consistent, imo.
I’m not super into player rankings, especially when we were discussing top 5 vs top 10. I would say most people with his resume are considered top 5, at least borderline, but I won’t argue. Whether he deserves all of those all NBA first teams or not is kind of moot. We don’t do that type of retrospective with most players (other than MVP).
I will say that this is the first time in his career that the Celtics were better with him off the court than on, which is why I think the whole argument that the Celtics have been stacked for his whole career kind of funny. They have been very good teams, sure, but the Celtics have typically fallen apart without him on the court…until this season. That rookie season where Kyrie and Hayward were hurt..Horford and Tatum were by far the best players on that team in the playoffs. They had absolutely monster +/- numbers, which is wild for a rookie getting to the ECFs. The team was junk without Horford and Tatum on the floor in those playoffs.
Tatum is a very weird player to analyze. He is over-reliant on the 3 and can be inconsistent offensively, but he still posts ridiculous impact numbers and +/- on/off numbers despite all of that. That’s not usually the sign of a very good player that’s propped up by depth.
Klomp wrote:I think some of Tatum's perceptions could be because the NBA casual is getting bored with him. This is his seventh season. He's been to the playoffs every year. The Celtics have been a No. 1 or 2 seed five times. And to this point, Tatum has no hardware to show for it. At this point, maybe he's just on the level of a Reggie Miller?
Just FYI, Tatum after this season has already surpassed Miller in all NBA teams, and he is only 26. Never mind the fact that Miller never made it beyond all NBA third team, and Tatum has made it to the first team 3 times. He’s also matched Miller in all star appearances already.
