Jayson Tatum Will Be The Key To The Boston Celtics Beating The Brooklyn Nets

As literally everybody expected when the Boston Celtics decided to play their starters against a shorthanded Memphis Grizzlies team on the last day of the regular season, they booked themselves a first-round playoff rematch against the Brooklyn Nets. So, now it’s time to see whether the decision comes back to haunt them: as good as the Celtics have been this calendar year, they will have their hands full against a Brooklyn team that will be starting Kevin Durant and old frenemy Kyrie Irving. The key to winning this series might just be Jayson Tatum.

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Last year, the Jaylen Brown-less Celtics entered the playoffs as underdogs and, to nobody’s surprise, were eliminated by the Nets despite Tatum putting up a monster offensive effort. This year, however, Brown is healthy and the entire team is playing with much greater confidence. If starting center Robert Williams weren’t out without a torn meniscus, they would probably be heavy favorites heading into this afternoon’s Game 1.

However, Williams won’t be available until the end of the series at the earliest, and it might be more realistic to expect his return only if Boston manages to advance to the second round. Meanwhile, the Nets are teasing the potential Brooklyn debut of Ben Simmons, who they received in a trade with the Philadelphia 76ers for James Harden in an exchange of talented malcontents. If one of these two teams is trending upwards, it must be the Nets.

It’s possible, of course, that the Celtics aren’t too hung up on Simmons’s potential return to basketball activites. Simmons, who has somehow gone backward as an offensive player during his time in Philadelphia, flamed out in last year’s playoffs. It’s not inconceivable that the Nets might hurt their chances by attempting to incorporate a player with such a limited skillset as Simmons’ on the fly in the middle of a winner-take-all playoff series, as great of an impact he can make on the defensive end of the floor.

That’s just one reason why the Celtics are a much more functional unit than the Nets this time around. However, here’s the thing about the postseason: great performances by HOF-caliber players can end up erasing whatever advantages better-constructed rosters may have. We’ve seen this recently with players like LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo carrying their particular teams to championships over better-balanced squads.

That’s why the Celtics went with the New Big Three Model by teaming up Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen back in 2007, the last time that the franchise has won a title. Sometimes, the teams that have the greatest players just win: the NBA has always been a star-driven league and most likely always will be.

The Celtics are, unquestionably, a better team than the Nets, particularly given how utterly dysfunctional Brooklyn is on an institutional level. The problem is that the Nets also have two of the three greatest players in this series in Durant and Irving. If they are playing at their peak at the same time—something which, luckily for the Celtics, has not always been the case during the regular season—Boston’s advantages in both team offense and team defense simply might not matter.

This is why Tatum, the Celtics’ best player and a borderline league MVP candidate for his second-half heroics, might be the key to them getting their revenge on Brooklyn. Should Tatum play at the same level as he did in the last two games of the last series against the Nets, the Celtics could make quick work of their rivals. If not, it’s hard not to imagine that this is going to be a long, back-and-forth series, with the victor in question until the bitter end.