Exits: Keep the faith

Writer Maggie Doherty on Jayson Tatum's most dually admirable and loathed qualities, and the assured narrative shift coming for the Celtics.

Jul 05, 2025

Jayson Tatum was due.

He’d had a slow start against the Knicks in the second round of the playoffs, going 7/23—including 4/15 from three—in the Celtics’ Game One loss and contributing only 23 points in their bounce-back win in Game Three (Sixth Man of the Year Payton Pritchard led the team with 29). On offense he’d seemed tentative, favoring step-back threes over aggressive drives. He may have been worried about the wrist he’d hurt during the first round against the Orlando Magic, an injury that forced him to miss the first playoff game of his career. Tatum played his first playoff game in April 2018, at the tender age of twenty; going into Game Four in Madison Square Garden, he was poised to play his one hundred and twenty-first. He had been to the postseason eight times, to the Eastern Conference Finals five times, and to the NBA finals twice, winning it all on his second attempt.

All told, Tatum had played 1,500 more minutes than anyone else in the league since he was drafted in 2017 (this is to say nothing of the minutes he’s played for Team USA during the offseason). That’s a lot of minutes, a lot of miles, a lot of wear and tear on the body. He may have been due in more ways than one.

He started Game Four hot, hitting back-to-back threes in the first quarter. From there, he only got better. By the end of the first, he had amassed fifteen points. By halftime, he had twenty points to go along with six rebounds and two assists. By the fourth quarter, it was clear that he was in the middle of an epic game: his stat line—42 points, eight rebounds, four steals, and two blocks—is almost unmatched in playoff history.

Watching, I was reminded of a meme that sometimes circulates online, one that breaks down Tatum’s performance across a seven-game series. The first two games are marked with the question “Is he ok?” The second two are labeled “We’re witnessing the second coming of Christ.”

Great Tatum performances are always vindicating for us Celtic fans. Despite clear and conclusive evidence that Tatum is a great basketball player, and despite a preponderance of evidence indicating that he’s basically a good man, he is widely loathed. Weird and spurious reasons abound. Tatum went to Duke, which is literally a devil’s college. Tatum thinks he’s top five, but he’s clearly worse than Luka Doncic, a human traffic cone blessed with a shooter’s touch. Tatum worships Kobe Bryant, but he is no Kobe. He tries to be Kevin Garnett, but he’s no Garnett. Unlike other stars, he lacks something called “aura” (?), which is why he’ll never be “the face of the league.”

He’s not cool; he’s not intimidating; he is somehow too present as a father. His postgame celebrations are plagiarized. He is, worst of all, corny.

Much of this hate is just thinly veiled jealousy. Occasionally, an internet troll will come forward and admit that Tatum is tall, talented, good-looking, and incredibly successful in his chosen field—one can’t help but hate him. But those who claim to hate Tatum for basketball reasons are hardly more credible. One common accusation is that Tatum is “not clutch”: he disappears when the team most needs him, or falters with the game on the line. Some have even argued that the Celtics are a better team without Tatum, citing the team’s winning record during his absences (during this past season, the Celtics were 8-2 when Tatum sat). Last year, doubters crowed when Jaylen Brown was crowned MVP of both the ECF and Finals. Here was proof positive that Brown, not Tatum, was the team’s true superstar.

Such claims are, to put it simply, very stupid. They are also easily disproved. Tatum is in fact pretty good in the clutch: as of this past February, he’d scored 79 points in the last five minutes of close games (sixth most among players), dished out twenty assists, and was shooting 63.2% on clutch two-pointers. His plus/minus this past season was +534; over the course of his career, he’s +3645. And if you don’t put much stock in analytics, you can simply use your eyes: the Celtics play best when they play through him on offense, and they look lost when he’s not on the court.

For his part, Tatum accepts the hate with equanimity. “I live a great life,” he told the media during the press conference after the team’s Game Three win against the Knicks.

“I make a lot of money. I take care of my family. I’ve been able to experience a lot of things. But you have to accept what comes with that, right?”

He welcomes the praise and the criticism, the accolades and the hate. “That comes with being that guy,” he explained. “I always say you’ve got to be the same person if things are going great and when things aren’t going great. You can’t switch up. That’s the character of a good man.”

Such poise, such maturity, such generosity of spirit: of course some people can’t stand the guy. We live in a sick, depraved country that venerates the worst men imaginable and consistently elevates them to positions of power. We prefer our athletes to be assholes, crude and ruthless and addicted to winning, capable of taking every slight personally and incapable of taking the long view. For some, this is peak masculinity, a gender formation marked by selfishness and defensiveness. Men who exhibit it may be strong men (or strongmen), but theirs is a brittle kind of strength.

Tatum, by contrast, is a man who is competitive but grounded, someone who wins a lot and does so with grace. He openly loves his mother and his children, he accepts criticism, he demonstrates respect for others in the hope of earning their respect in turn. To some, he is the definition of a good man, the kind that is increasingly hard to find. To others, no matter what he accomplishes, he will never be anything other than soft.

A confession: I didn’t see the injury happen live. When the Knicks took a three-point lead early in the fourth quarter, I decided I needed a break. I lurched out of the room under the weight of my very pregnant belly, explaining to my husband that high levels of cortisol were “bad for the baby.” The truth was that I couldn’t stand to see my team suffer.

I have loved the Celtics with a fierce intensity since I was capable of loving anything or anyone. According to family lore, the first non-familial voice I heard as an infant was that of legendary Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most. My earliest childhood memories are of the Big Three—Bird, McHale, and Parish—fast-breaking down the parquet floor, broken feet and bad backs be damned. My undying love for the boys in green carried me through the tough years with Rick Pitino; it helped me endure Antoine Walker’s antics and weather losing season after losing season with Paul Pierce. The 2008 championship felt like a reward for my loyalty. The 2024 championship felt both inevitable and like an undeserved gift.

Late last June, three days after the Celtics clinched the title, my husband and I, along with nearly a million other fans, went downtown to watch the team parade by on duck boats, amphibious vehicles the city loans out to its title-winning teams. The event showed the city at its finest: diverse, boisterous, and unreservedly ready for a good time. Tatum looked as happy as I’d ever seen him. He grinned at the crowd; he gesticulated and laughed. He clutched the Larry O’Brien trophy tightly, as if worried someone was planning to steal it away. Every so often, he spread his long arms outward and turned his face to the sky, looking for all the world like a bird about to take flight.

Another confession: when I saw the video of Tatum heading to the locker room in a wheelchair, head in his hands, I wept. I felt foolish. How could I harbor such an absurd, intense affection for a man I’ve never met? But then, how could such a devastating injury befall someone so good, in every sense of the word? My husband, a better Catholic than I am, said a prayer for Tatum, then reminded me of the story of Job and the lesson it teaches us: suffering arrives without reason, and the only thing we can do is keep our faith.

I’m trying. Tatum is young, only twenty-seven, and blessed with good genes, a strong work ethic, and nearly superhuman strength (if you doubt me, take a look at this video in which he deadlifts nearly 500 pounds for reps). If Kevin Durant can come back from a torn Achilles at age thirty, then there’s no reason that Tatum can’t rehab and return. Perhaps he’ll be a different kind of athlete, one more likely to spot up than take it to the rack. Or perhaps he’ll become one of the great ‘what ifs’ of NBA history, a highly accomplished player who might have achieved so much more.

If Tatum’s fate is uncertain, the fate of his team is more uncertain still. Celtics management needed to make moves this coming offseason anyway—with their current roster, they’re due to pay $280 million in taxes—but now, with Tatum likely out for all of next season, there’s less incentive to keep the core of the team intact. Kristaps Porzingis is probably gone—I can already hear Celtics fans saying “good riddance” in unison—and Jrue Holiday may well be gone too. Will the Celtics look to offload Jaylen Brown, currently on a $304 million-dollar supermax contract? Will they keep Derrick White, one of the best defensive guards to play the game and the epitome of a good egg? Will they make a big offseason play or will they write off next season and see what they can get in the draft? Brad Stevens has yet to let us down as a GM—“In Brad We Trust,” goes one Celtics motto—but it’s hard to know what to do when your franchise player goes down indefinitely.

The only thing I’m certain of is that the narrative is about to shift.

The talking heads, many of them longstanding Tatum skeptics, are suddenly going to pivot. No more “Is Tatum actually good???” TV segments, no more unflattering comparisons between Tatum and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, or Tatum and Doncic, or Tatum and his teammate Brown. Instead, we’re going to get a lot of thoughts and prayers, and earnest flattery, and career assessments that will demonstrate that the stats Tatum has put up in only eight seasons place him among the greats. Pundit after pundit will talk about how impressive Tatum has been throughout his career—a fact they can only admit now that there’s no guarantee he’ll ever be so impressive again.

While I was writing this piece, Tatum underwent surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles tendon in his right leg. He is expected to make a full recovery. There is no timetable for his return.

Tatum’s season may have been over, but the Celtics’ season was not—or at least not yet. There were, somehow, more games to be played, more chances for the Celtics who remain healthy to avenge their fallen teammate. I watched those games, as I watched nearly every other game this season, and I worked to keep the faith. And when the Celtics fell, as I knew they would, I took a page from Tatum’s book. I didn’t switch it up. I resolved to be the same person—the same faithful fan—during the bad times as I’ve been during the good.

Editor’s note: As Maggie mentioned in her piece, she was pregnant when she wrote this — her due date just a week or so after she filed this with me when the Celtics were eliminated. Since then, her predictions for who the Celtics were going to cut loose have come true. I left them as-is, in past-future tense, to be true to her writing and original feelings, as much as to show her great foresight. My thanks (and happiest wishes!) are with her for writing this at such a pinnacle point in her own life.