Jayson Tatum Both Frustrated and Excited About His Play, But One Hurdle Still Looms

Halfway through the second quarter of their battle with Minnesota, Derrick White drove right, Steve Nash’d his way through the baseline, and found Jayson Tatum at the top of the three-point line. Tatum found his way past Donte DiVincenzo, stepped left past Rudy Gobert, and jumped for a wide-open, uncontested layup.

He left it short. He’s been doing that. Tatum is shooting 57% on layups during his return to the Boston Celtics.

“I ain't know how this s--t was going to be,” Tatum said after the loss to the Timberwolves. “I mean, it's tough. In the moment, you try not to think about it, you just want to be Jayson Tatum and feel like yourself again. I'm not Superman, so it's obviously going to take some time. I think the next day I can give myself a little more grace over certain things, but in the moment, it's frustrating.”

Tatum’s super power has always been moving on to the next thing quickly. Whether it’s the next play in a game or the next game after a loss, Tatum has been one of the most level-headed stars in town. He is the embodiment of “never too high, never too low.”

So when the third quarter came around, and maybe with some rest at halftime refilling his reserves, Tatum went back to work. He came off a Neemias Queta screen, snaked his way into the lane with Gobert on his hip, and rose up to finish a tough layup past one of the league’s toughest rim protectors. It triggered a classic Tatum outburst: 13 points on three layups, two pull-up three-pointers, and a free throw.

This is the duality of Tatum’s recovery. The best and the worst, the ups and down, all in the same game, maybe the same quarter. Or hell, even in the same possession.

“I'm still just trying to figure it out,” Tatum said. “It's been a long time. It's only my what? Ninth game, eighth game? So still just trying to get a feel for it.”

The behind-the-scenes rehab was a lot more linear than this. There were so many days before calf raises, then there were benchmarks for how much weight the tendon could bear, how many steps he could take on his own, and so on. Everything had a box to check. Once it was completed, they moved on to the next thing.

This? This abstract.

“For me, it's mental,” Tatum said. “It's a lot of things I talk to [trainer] Nick [Sang] about, just things that I noticed throughout a game, certain plays, certain moments of contact, certain things of, you know, explosion, things attacking, getting downhill, the pace and speed of certain plays that just felt really normal. It felt really good, or I didn't think about it at all. Just finding more and more moments of those from game to game that get me really excited.”

And there's plenty to get excited about if he can sift through the frustration, but the only boxes left are in his mind. There's no graph on someone’s iPad that will measure Tatum’s confidence level in his own body. That's not to say there aren’t tangible, physical goals for him to reach. There are. But a lot getting to that point starts in his brain, not his leg.

“[I talk to] a group of people, people that have been through this,” Tatum said. “Medical team, my mom, Deuce, I talk to everybody. Just like I have throughout — since I had surgery, the communication that people that have lent their hand out to as a resource to be helpful. Guys in the league, guys that's retired, it’s a lot of people.”

The hard part for him and his teammates is that this is all necessary for him to be at his best when they need him the most. These struggles are the turbulence during takeoff, and the hope is that the ride gets smoother as the flight goes on.

Everyone knew it would be bumpy, but it doesn’t make it any less unsettling.

“It’s the first time I went through something like this,” Tatum said. “It’s just been a long time. It was a long time before I could shoot a basketball, before I could walk. So just trying to knock the rush off game by game. I find great spurts and moments from game to game and, you know, just trying to put more of them together … It’s kind of just a rhythm and a feel thing. It’s just been a while.”