How Jayson Tatum helped Celtics offense get past the Suns, even if he struggled

It’s been a rough week on the court for Jayson Tatum.

After winning Eastern Conference Player of the Month, he has started the Boston Celtics’ five-game trip shooting 38.7 percent from the field. He missed the game-winner in Cleveland after the Celtics blew a 22-point advantage. He bricked a wide-open 3 to take the lead in the final minute of the loss to the Denver Nuggets.

Then in Phoenix, facing the specter of a third-straight loss to a potential contender, he found a way to put the losing streak to bed. But after shooting 11 of 28, he didn’t feel like he helped much.

“I finally stopped turning the ball over,” Tatum told ESPN’s Lisa Salters after Boston defeated the Suns 117-107 on Saturday. “I’m thankful I got some great teammates, ’cause I stunk it up tonight.”

How do the Celtics win games when their best player doesn’t quite have it? How does Tatum stay relevant in the plays where he isn’t clanking one off the iron?

The beauty of having a star player is that even when they struggle, the defense still fears they’ll catch fire at any moment. That’s kind of Tatum’s thing. He’ll be a bricklayer for 20 minutes, suddenly hit a string of daggers and Boston has momentum again. That means he usually gets the coverage he wants at different points of the game.

Tatum will often operate from the elbow in these moments, where he can drag out a one-on-one matchup and dribble through his legs until he inevitably takes a stepback 3 and buries it. Teams usually don’t want to risk this happening, so they’ll often blitz him against the sideline to get the ball out of his hands. That was a problem for him, but now it’s his comfort zone.

This is a good example of how the Celtics deal with a transition opportunity that goes nowhere. The play starts with Derrick White pushing it up the floor and finding nothing, and the ball resetting to Tatum. When Tatum has the ball up toward the elbow, White knows they can immediately flow into a pick-and-roll and have options. White makes sure he leans into Kevin Durant to keep him stuck on the screen, ensuring Tatum has the time to drag the blitz to the sideline.

That screen allows the Celtics offense to keep working when Tatum doesn’t have his touch. Everyone in the starting lineup has interchangeable roles, so the guards often serve as screeners who then turn into dangerous playmakers.

With Luke Kornet lurking behind the basket, all he has to do is sneak in front of the help defender and then White has multiple options. He waits to see how Phoenix is rotating, then it’s easy money from there.

Because the Suns have several smaller defenders, they had to keep Durant on Tatum as much as they could. That’s exactly what Boston wants against Phoenix, because that meant pulling Durant away from the action.

When Tatum brings the ball down on this possession and has Durant on him, the goal is to set up a pick-and-roll with White that has Durant and Suns center Jusuf Nurkić pulled as far away from the paint as possible. Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla wants all the rim protectors out of the paint, which is going to put Phoenix in scramble mode.

Tatum could simply give up the ball to White and walk away, but they need to ensure Durant is spaced out. Watch how they make that happen.

Tatum had just turned it over trying to lob over the top to White a few minutes earlier, so the Celtics wanted to give him a much easier pass into space. Considering he threw the ball out of bounds on consecutive plays in the fourth quarter, he was just off Saturday night.

But Al Horford popping into this space makes it so easy to get him the ball, while the action also pulls Durant toward the sideline to ensure he can’t help on the next action of this sequence. Once the Celtics are attacking Nurkić in that deep drop without any help, it’s game over.

When Phoenix goes small, Boston can position Tatum from the middle of the floor and operate in the nooks and crannies of the defense.

When Royce O’Neale was at the five, the Celtics would run a “Horns” set so Tatum could post Durant up at the top of the arc. This formation, with two screeners on the free-throw line and two shooters in the corners, is often used when the Celtics want to create some confusion for the defense as they try to switch in tight spaces.

This play has Jaylen Brown set a hard step-up screen to take Grayson Allen off White. As White spaces out and Tatum fakes a pass to him to draw the help defender away from the play, Allen doesn’t commit to guarding Brown on the roll and leaves Tatum an opening to lob it over the top.

This play was important because it was a reminder of how the Celtics can run a crunchtime offense without trying to mismatch hunt in space. Their crunchtime offense was marred by forcing switches and getting locked up in isolation. When this play works earlier in the quarter, the Celtics usually will run it back later in crunchtime with slightly different personnel.

So when the Suns had closed in on Boston’s lead and Tatum had a stinker of an isolation possession on Allen, they decided to run back the Horns play.

Jrue Holiday is one of the team’s best screeners, so the Celtics made him the screener and Brown the decoy this time. Allen could have shoved the screener to throw off the timing, like the Suns did the first time Boston ran this play, but he played it passively. That made it easy for Holiday to slip the screen with nobody on him.

If Durant had active hands on Tatum, maybe he could have made the entry pass to Holiday tougher. But Phoenix made this one too easy. When the opponent is undersized, often playing over the top instead of straight through them is the best approach.

Denver and Cleveland make that so hard because they have good defensive length and execution. Boston couldn’t break through that as its offense went stale.

Tatum did struggle at many points this past week, but the win over the Suns was a reminder he’s willing to set up his teammates to score when he can’t do it himself. Whether Boston can do that consistently in the playoffs remains to be seen after this past week. While the Celtics’ crunchtime offense looks shaky right now, this was a reminder that Tatum is at his best when he’s a playmaker first.

(Photo: Chris Coduto / Getty Images)