Advisors Heaving Plastic
In a stroke of grave and untimely brand crossover misfortune, Jayson Tatum currently features in an ad drawing parallels between Clark Kent in his day-to-day and himself, both of them morphing into Superman when necessary. At least one of those things, I saw on Monday night; the other, with apologies to the Marvel/DC set, I wasn’t planning on seeing anyway.
Then, with 42 points, eight rebounds, four each of assists and steals[1], but with his Boston Celtics down 111-104 with a little over three minutes left to go, Tatum collapsed on a non-contact scramble for the ball against the New York Knicks’ OG Anunoby, who gathered the rock and dunked to put the Knicks up nine. Tatum grabbed his right ankle, left in a wheelchair, and the rest of us were left looking for Paul Pierce.
Many noted Tatum’s own visible pain when he fell to the floor; without the MRI, we don’t know beyond what we’ve seen before, but I’ll speak on behalf of the readership and say we’re all wishing him the best in outcome and recovery. Behind a 39-point effort from Jalen Brunson, as well as 23 and 11 from Karl-Anthony Towns, the Knicks won Game 4 of this series 121-113 to go up 3-1 on the, yup, defending champion Boston Celtics. Throw on the Matthew Lesko coat: there are so many questions, and why are they all in green??
Q: Let’s start with me, me.
A: Sounds great, me.
Q: Me, why didn’t you write about the Celtics’ 115-93 victory in Game 3?
A: Too familiar with the me, first of all. Why would I try to describe what’s been happening all season, and for the past two years? They were due for a title, given talent and style, but injuries are a concern for any team in any given season. I assume we’ll return to this, perhaps immediately.
Q: Nobody’s ever due for a title, but alright. So what now about Tatum?
A: All signs point to the ankle-adjacent injury that can extend into the following season. We’ll see; I love Tatum’s game and, as a Knicks fan who nevertheless loves good basketball and good villainy[2], wanted to see it in full extension in this series. In Game 4, he was jetting toward that, if not already there. We deserved the Tatum-Brunson showdown.
Q: Alright, but dude, you know that because without Tatum, this whole ser-
A: NOPE, no, fuck that. Again: injuries happen every year, to every team. One key injury swings a playoff series and can, has swing championships. All anybody ever has to play is whom they have on hand at any given time.
This is another gratuitous way of saying that YEZZIR, the NEW. YORK. KNICKERBOCKERS are leading the defending NBA champion Boston Celtics 3 games to 1 in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. Half of me thinks that it not being 3-0 will make this inevitable downfall not so embarrassing.
Fictional and rather poor Q+A doesn’t get at Jaylen Brown, though, because he’s the one with the accolades that Tatum seems so desperate to claim. Brown is the one with both conference finals and Finals MVPs in his cracked rear view. He’s the one who has carried the Celtics through several games in the mud; Tatum, meanwhile, spent much of his championship summer on the Team USA bench, under secondhand scrutiny[3].
Something else, though, does strike me about the injury to Jayson Tatum. Because of improved longevity all around and, particularly with regard to the Celtics on multiple fronts, the longevity of LeBron James, fans have, ehh, perhaps been susceptible to being spoiled. Seeing players make repeated, deep playoff runs, as the Celtics have, can make fans forget that these dudes are playing upward of 90-100 games a year.
After a while, that time catches up, creating an opportunity to pounce. 82 games a year, plus playoffs, and then the league’s elite – an internationally-diverse bunch, mind you – spend time with their respective national teams for regional tournaments or Olympics tuneups. The labor compounds, breaking bodies down either slowly, as with chronic back or knee injuries, or all at once, with a torn ligament or rolled ankle that becomes definitive from that point forward.
On their side, the Celtics have the second-deepest team in the league after Oklahoma City, recent championship experience, a shot quality profile that they stick to relentlessly[4] and a collective basketball IQ between coaching staff and players that, even without Tatum, an eventual Game 7 in TD Garden would conjure an ancestral familiarity in the eardrums of anyone who has ever heard of the Knicks, causing them to smirk with great melancholy and exclaim, “Ahhh, yes. The New York Knicks. I remember the New York Knicks.”
Not unlike after Game 2, though, I can’t get enough of this feeling. Is this the new peak of recent Knicks fandom? It’s hard to beat; it’s definitely impossible to believe[5]. All of this can all go off the rails so quickly in many of the same, stupid ways it has before, but that it hasn’t yet is, eh, just, really, really nice.
The NBA Draft Lottery also happened on Monday night. Against the odds both mathematically and morally, the Dallas Mavericks won the rights to pick Duke’s next great white hope, Cooper Flagg. Relentlessly embattled Mavericks executive Nico Harrison has as good a chance of getting fired in the next 9-12 months as he does of winning an award just for drafting Flagg.
As lottery night reminds us every year, each team is trying to piece this together. When it happens, when it coalesces – as it finally did with the Celtics last year – it can look like perfection. What Brunson, KAT and the Knicks have conjured up so far points elsewhere.
New York isn’t coming together quite like that, at least not yet, but they are pressing up against their own reserves of resiliency. A slight sigh of relief came in knowing that nobody caused Tatum’s injury directly, but these Knicks also aren’t looking for a handout.
After finally winning a home game in Madison Square Garden, the series heads back to Boston for Game 5. No 3-1 lead is a handout, but it can be handed back. Next player up.
[1] And turnovers—!
[2] Trae Young, all the expletives, but he did rise to the MSG lights. Better to love or hate than to be lukewarm.
[3] It turned out that he was dealing with some residual hurt from the playoffs, reportedly a difficult ankle injury.
[4] Boston shot 18/48 (37.5%) from three in Game 4, not quite their 50% from Game 3 but much better than the first two games of the series, both losses.
[5] Nova Pope: Welcome; sorry about the Bulls; shout out to Villanova; Saint Augustine, pray for us.
Tuesdays With Horry 