SAN FRANCISCO — He’s now, by vote, a top-five NBA player and conference finals MVP.
Jayson Tatum also admits that for all of his confidence, there have been times when he questioned himself during the darker times over the first half of this season.
“I’ll be honest, for myself, there have been times where I questioned, am I the right person to kind of lead a group like this,” the Celtics star said prior to Wednesday’s practice in the Chase Center. “You know, never like doubted myself, but just moments after some of those losses and the tougher parts of the season. That’s human nature to kind of question yourself and things like that.
“But just always stick to what you believe in and trust in the work that you’ve put in,” said Tatum. “You know, it can’t rain forever. … This is a group. This is a team sport. We lean on each other in those moments. As hard as it can be in those times, you’ve got to come closer together”
The year was, as Jaylen Brown remembers it, a family struggle carried out in public.
The Celtics had a rookie head coach, young stars who didn’t always play well together, and one player (Marcus Smart) who felt it necessary to challenge the team’s two best offensive players (Tatum and Brown) to pass the damned ball.
And yet they’re here, in the Chase Center, with a chance to deliver what would be an NBA-record 18th title to the Celtics. And if the end result of this season’s turnaround was a dramatic growth spurt, it didn’t come without a loud chorus of critics.
But that’s how it goes in Boston, Brown says now, on the eve of Game 1 of the NBA Finals against Golden State.
“Early on in the season, I was injured. I missed about 15 games,” Brown said prior to Wednesday’s practice. “You know, the narrative isn’t going to say that. They are just going to say that you guys lost. Doesn’t matter what the excuse is.
“We’ve got a first-year head coach. We were trying to figure it out. We play in a city that it has no patience for any excuses, so we didn’t make any. But as things started to come together, we got healthier. We made a couple moves in the front office that were vital for us, and things started to fall in line. I think that’s what, if you ask me, that’s what I believe. But you ask somebody else, they might say something different.”
A city without patience is exactly how Smart looks at his NBA home. He admits that the local environment had something, however much, to do with the Celtics’ ongoing run as the hottest team in the league since mid-January.
“I’ve been here in this city for eight years playing for Boston, and I’ve heard everything,” the Celtics point guard said with a smile. “So for me it was a normal day in the office.
“Like JB said, we play for a city that’s very impatient. They have every right to be. The things that they have accomplished, you know, it’s kind of hard not to be impatient. We understood it. We get it. It just helps us strive to even go out there and please that impatience that they have. It’s fuel to our fire.”
For Tatum, that friction also led him to self-examination.
“A concern, no. Were there like moments that were tough? It was just like, you know, it was very frustrating,” he said. “You know, head-scratching and all those type of things. It was more so, how can we figure it out? It wasn’t, like man, we can’t do this. It was, we got to figure something else out. It was tough. There were definitely some tough moments. I always remember the fun moments — my first year going to the conference finals; the bubble year going to the conference finals when we were winning all the time. Beginning of this year, every game was like, I don’t know if we’re going to win. It was a lot tougher than it should be, and that’s something I wasn’t used to.”
