Now that Team USA has won the gold medal and Jayson Tatum even played in the championship game, the Celtics roster can finally rest for the summer. But The Athletic still has some work to do, answering our readers’ questions about all things Celtics. In part one of our offseason mailbag, Jared Weiss answers your questions after Tatum, Derrick White , and Jrue Holiday won their gold medals Saturday.
Questions have been edited for style, length and clarity. Advertisement Are you nervous about the mindset Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown will bring into the coming season after their mutual summers of Olympic “disrespect?” — Tom D. I know Celtics fans, myself included, are upset with Steve Kerr benching JT on top of JB not being selected for the USA team.
But maybe there is a silver lining. I think this will be a rallying cry for the 2024-2025 team, serving as motivation to repeat. It’s hard to repeat, but the disrespect shown to the Jays might end up helping the Celtics.
Do you agree? — Had M. Repeating is usually hard for several reasons. You can rarely keep your entire rotation together since a role player usually gets a big free-agency offer.
Boston managed to lock everyone down long-term. Then, those players who emerged over the championship run have to buy into their roles the next season. The way this rotation is set up, there isn’t a player who can reasonably say they deserve to move up the depth chart.
Brown and Tatum’s snubs, even if they are effectively due to Holiday and White getting minutes, probably won’t create division within the locker room. The Jays know they play a different role than White and Holiday. They know how crucial those players are to their success in Boston.
Holiday and White have established their priorities, so there’s no reason to expect they will want more touches or freedom in the offense because of this. Everything about the way the Celtics operated last year indicates something petty isn’t going to disrupt their harmony. This Olympics will go a long way to make the Jays feel like they have more to prove.
There already would have been motivation to fight the narrative that they had an easy path to the title, but that can be seen more as undervaluing rather than disrespecting. This should push Tatum to be a better 3-point shooter and get out of whatever this prolonged slump is. It’s the main reason he was not getting minutes when Kerr tightened up his rotation.
Tatum has not been hitting his shots. Brown should take this as a sign he needs to keep growing as a playmaker. He pointed to basketball politics as a reason he wasn’t selected, so he’ll have to continue to evaluate what opportunities he is willing to sacrifice to stay true to himself.
But so far, everything Tatum and Brown have done to get to this point has been working and there’s no reason to expect this Olympics moment is going to be more than a bump in the road. Yabu? Yabu! — Aaron M. It’s hard to add more to this because Aaron captured the topic so comprehensively.
But yes, Guerschon Yabusele — Yabu — is the phenomenon sweeping the basketball world. He was good for France and saved his best for last, scoring 20 points in the gold-medal game while getting to the line 10 times. This was the layered big man the Celtics hoped they were drafting 13 picks after they hit a home run on Jaylen Brown at the 2016 draft.
Yabusele was a raw prospect, and Boston wasn’t the right development situation for a player who needed so much refinement. He bounced around once he left the NBA for China but has found a home starting for Real Madrid and now the French national team. Advertisement Now that he is shooting well on above-the-break 3s and can rip and go off the catch, he would make a decent role player if he came back stateside.
His activity level on defense has been solid when guarding wings, he keeps his hands up and has made some good reads on when to help off of the corners. He’s good at looking for a pass right off the catch when he posts up, and he can space well on the weak side so he isn’t clogging the lanes. Some of those drives he made off the catch looked like they would work against NBA-level defenses.
He has one year left on his Real Madrid contract, so a team would have to buy him out and then sign him to a deal with enough guarantees to convince him to leave arguably the best club outside of the U.S. Considering Boston already has Xavier Tillman in a similar role and even minimum deals come with a hefty luxury tax penalty, it’s unlikely he’s making a return.
I’d like to know why no one comments on Tatum’s shot mechanics. I’ve seen the word “inconsistent” in several stories about his Olympic performance, but it’s as if his struggles were random or caused by fatigue. His jump shot is so flawed and I wonder if he’ll ever address that? He holds the ball so low and proceeds to bring it up —a long distance — before he releases it.
Much can go wrong and does. The best shooters have a compact motion, but that’s not what JT has. If he could get his efficiency up, the C’s would be really hard to beat.
Any idea if he’s thought of this? — Matthew R. Tatum is going through one of the most bizarre shooting slumps we’ve seen in some time. First off, his shot does not need an overhaul just because it’s a lengthy two-motion delivery.
He’s one of the tallest pull-up shooters in the game, has a wide and balanced base, and maintains his tempo on his mechanics well. He doesn’t need to rush his delivery, and this is the same shot that turned him into one of the best pull-up shooters in the league a few years ago. It just shows how easy a path the Celtics had to the championship that their best player shot 28.
3 percent from deep and they still won the title with little suspense. It was especially strange since he shot 39.8 percent in the 44 games from the start of January, after doing some work on his shot with his trainer in late December.
Throughout the postseason, coaches who worked with Tatum maintained he was healthy and his shot mechanics looked fine. Poring over the tape during the postseason, his right foot would sometimes be out of place and he didn’t get off the ground on balance. Considering he has been shooting poorly on uncontested spot-up 3s, this seems more like fatigue and playoff-level defensive pressure than anything.
But he’s got something special going with the way he drops the ball on the catch and then has that big arc of a raise to get it to his set point above his right eye. That motion gives him time to set his feet and get that set point too high for defenders to affect, which is why he’s always been so good with contested shots. Advertisement How do you think the Celtics with a healthy Kristaps Porziņģis would do against the current U.
S. Olympic team and the rest of the field? — Barry F. It’s a tough call, but a Celtics team that is running its system should still beat any national team.
Team USA was able to turn it on for stretches to showcase its incredible talent, but even late in the gold medal game, the Americans were making careless turnovers. Boston could play at a higher pace and execute more efficiently than any opponent Team USA faced. These Olympic defenses aren’t on a string the same way the Celtics are.
Assuming the Celtics would be playing clones of themselves on Team USA, at least the Olympic team would share the same mind when the clones are guarding the real players. The one thing that would hurt the Celtics is that mismatch hunting against Team USA wouldn’t be nearly as effective. So maybe the Celtics get bogged up targeting the USA guards in the post and then can’t stop the USA in isolation and it would be competitive.
But I’ll pick the team that has been together for a whole season. (Top photo of Guerschon Yabusele, left, and Jayson Tatum, center: Damien Meyer / AFP via Getty Images).
