The Boston Celtics’ Success Isn’t Dependent On Jayson Tatum’s Point Totals

The Boston Celtics took a 1-0 NBA Finals lead on Thursday after falling behind the Golden State Warriors by 12 points. What might be even more impressive was how they did it with their start player, Jayson Tatum, going just 3-for-17 from the line. In Sunday’s Game 2, Tatum scored 28 points and yet the Warriors demolished them 107-88 to tie the series at 1-1.

Here’s the thing: Tatum did not have a bad game on Thursday. He dished 12 assists and had five defensive rebounds and went 5-of-7 on the free-throw line. A younger Tatum might have been driven to attempt to over-compensate for his poor scoring night, but this version consistently made the correct basketball reads, leaned into his ball distribution skills and helped the Celtics’ defense limit the Warriors to 16 points in the decisive fourth quarter.

“I had more assists than points last game,” said Tatum, who actually scored 12 points to go along with his assist total. “So, I feel like I made the right play more often than not. You know, it’s not much to overthink. I feel like it’s a lot of shots, the open shots that I miss more often than not that I make.”

Tatum, despite his poor scoring night, had a +16 rating while on the court on Thursday. Despite going 8-for-19 from the floor, he managed a career-worst plus-minus -36. While that stat doesn’t normally tell the entire story, here it works as an efficient summary of a blowout loss. This time around, Tatum and the rest of the starters were ineffective enough for head coach Ime Udoka to shut them down halfway through the fourth quarter.

Now, this wasn’t entirely on Tatum, but maybe that’s the entire point: individual stats don’t ever tell the story with these Boston Celtics. When the Celtics are playing together, avoiding terrible turnovers and working to get the perfect shot, they are the world-beaters that we saw in the fourth quarter of Game 1. When they’re none of that, they are the team we saw in the disastrous third quarter of Game 2.

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In Game 1, we saw why the Celtics have gone out of their way to keep Tatum and Jaylen Brown together for this long. When one can’t find his shot, the other more often not the other makes up the difference. Well, it turns out, that’s almost always.

In Game 1, Brown scored 24 and had a +22 rating with only four turnovers. In Game 2, he scored just once on 1-for-11 shooting after picking up his second foul. He ended his night with a misleading 17 points and an entirely earned -10 for a plus-minus.

What’s next? Heading into Game 2, the idea was that the Warriors were in trouble because they couldn’t expect Tatum to have back-to-back bad games. That, obviously, wasn’t the case: Tatum had a better scoring night on Sunday but objectively had a much worse everything-else night than on Thursday.

Then again, the Celtics couldn’t expect the Warriors to lose two straight games at home in the NBA Finals, could they? They can’t be hung up on how poorly they played in Game 2’s second half, they have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, they did their jobs: the NBA Finals is 1-1 and heading back to TD Garden. Hey, plus they still have yet to . A championship is potentially in their hands if they can keep from fumbling it away like a ball in transition.