Jayson Tatum, Boston Celtics best in show
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Each week during the 2022-23 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether the trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.
The Boston Celtics are clearly the NBA championship favorites
In a hallway beneath TD Garden, following a recent win over the Miami Heat, Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum raced his son Deuce from one end to the other, letting the 5-year-old beat him to the locker room, where the boy received more of a hero’s welcome than the father who just scored a season-high 49 points.
Deuce was born on the day his dad logged his first NBA double-double, seven weeks into his rookie year.
“That was the biggest year of my life, right?” Tatum said between games in the NBA Finals this past June. “Starting this new chapter in my career, I just had a child. My mindset was not to sacrifice either. I was going to be the best father I could, as well as the best basketball player. There was no guideline or exact way to do it. It was all about what was natural. … I’m around him every day. Being able to go through this journey together, because I was 19 when I got drafted, it’s like we’re growing up together. As he’s gotten older, I’m going through my career, sharing these moments, experiencing this together as we grow up.”
We should’ve known nine days later, when Tatum took the podium at the lowest moment of his professional career, that a season-ending Game 6 loss to the Golden State Warriors would fuel that growth, not inhibit it.
“It’s hard,” Tatum, as dejected as we had seen him in five NBA seasons, said at the time. “It’s hard getting to this point. It’s even harder getting over the hump and winning it. It’s been a long journey, a long process. That’s what I took from it: It’s tough. You’ve got to take it up another level to do what we want to do.”
Only the brashness of youth could convince Tatum that fatherhood and reaching the pinnacle of his sport are not…
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