Jayson Tatum should (and probably will) be on the All-NBA First Team

This is probably the most talented Celtics team since 1986, and they’ve spent the last five months tearing through the NBA accordingly. In the interest of satisfying our selfish desires for the world to call our players the best and to enhance their Wikipedia articles with an additional line of text under the “awards” tab, let’s hand out some awards. You do have some awards for us, right? Right, guys?

Well… maybe. The league only hands out eight “awards” that reflect regular season performance each year. There are several other community and teammate-oriented awards, but due to their extremely subjective nature, I will not be trying to predict them. The awards we will be investigating are (inhales):

Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved Player, Sixth Man of the Year, Clutch Player of the Year, Coach of the Year, and Executive of the Year. If you want to be one of the cool kids, you’ll refer to the whole set by its super-acronym: M.V.P.D.P.O.Y.R.O.Y.M.I.P.S.M.O.Y.C.P.O.Y.C.O.Y.E.O.Y.

So, which of these will the Celtics be taking home? The answer may shock you.

Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

The Celtics have been spectacular precisely because they’ve forgone chasing individual accolades, instead leaning into sacrifice and teamwork within their five-man death lineup of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, Jrue Holiday, and Kristaps Porzingis. None of those five have a remote statistical case to win any of the six player awards, and while Head Coach Joe Mazzulla could easily deserve Coach of the Year honors, that award usually lands with a team that wildly overachieved. As amazing as the Celtics have been, this isn’t that.

Many would argue that President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens deserves some serious props for the team he’s built around the two-man core he used to coach. Perhaps that will manifest in an Executive of the Year nod. That award is about as easy to predict as the weather four days from now. Some people—some of them “experts” may tell you they know what it will be, but they don’t. They just don’t.

However, here comes an additional accolade to the rescue. The NBA dishes out honorific All-NBA and All-Defensive lists, the former of which is probably more important to many players than most of the individual awards. Making an All-NBA team can make a hundred-something million-dollar difference in a player’s contract, as it did for Jaylen Brown last summer. Those aren’t “awards,” per se, but they can certainly work for our purposes.

To differentiate awards from each other, I’ve also devised a complex rating system for how cool they are:

S-Tier (First sentence of Hall of Fame plaque): Most Valuable Player

A+ Tier (When I explain to my kids how good he was, this award is in the first sentence): All-NBA First Team, Defensive Player of the Year

A Tier (Used to win arguments about if a player is actually good or not): All-NBA Second Team, All-NBA Third Team, All-Defensive First Team

B Tier (Wikipedia article enhancers but doesn’t automatically make someone good): All-Defensive Second Team, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved Player, Sixth Man of the Year

C Tier (If you use this to try to win an argument, you will lose that argument): Clutch Player of the Year, Coach of the Year

Now that all that is out of the way, here we go with installment one! Today, we will deal with everyone’s favorite perennial All-NBA First Teamer: Jayson Tatum, and specifically the three awards he could possibly win paired with their likelihood of actually happening. Please enjoy.

Photo by Brian Babineau/NBAE via Getty Images

Jayson Tatum

Possible Awards: MVP (no), All-NBA First Team (probably), All-NBA Second Team (definitely)

Likely award coolness ranking: A+ Tier (When I explain to my kids how good he was, this award is in the first sentence)

Welcome back to this year’s installment of the question we all ask every year: is Jayson Tatum a top-five player in the NBA? If you just want the answer, yes. I think he is.

He’s not the best player in the league, nor will he or should he win the MVP award. There was a crisp week-and-a-half where the Celtics and Tatum put on a full-court press for it, saying he was the best player on the best team and “impacted winning more than anyone else.” That was a load of baloney, and Tatum never had a snowballs chance in Venus of winning it. And I doubt he really cares either.

More specifically, we’re asking if Tatum was exactly the fifth-best player in the 2024 NBA, since one through four is not up for debate if you ask me. The NBA’s three horsemen of the apocalypse—Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic, and Giannis Antetokounmpo—occupy the first three spots and will until further notice. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has been so undeniably spectacular that arguing Tatum deserves the four spot is silly. But five is a very reasonable mark.

Some would argue that comparison is the thief of fun, but I’d say it’s one of the great enablers of it. To me, the NBA is awesome precisely because of the absurd conversations we can have about if Jayson Tatum is a better player than Jalen Brunson or Anthony Edwards, his main competitors for the All-NBA First Team nod.

“Better” is a wonderful world, because it means absolutely nothing when you break it down. All-NBA teams are supposed to commemorate the 15 best players in the league and break them up into tiers of five, so we’ll have to decide who is better than who at some point.

However, we as a society have failed miserably at that task. Here’s my non-exhaustive list of the things NBA media use to define who is “better”:

• More physically talented
• More developed basketball skills
• Younger, so more impressive
• Older, so more reliable
• On a 60-win team, so he’s a winner
• On a 45-win team, but that’s not his fault
• He’s earned it
• Superior statistical case
• Superior eye-test case

What’s even richer is that the All-NBA teams do not measure who the best 15 players are, but merely the aggregate—and more importantly publicly available—opinions of an extremely small number of voters. These voters are basketball writers and media members, often times with highly idiosyncratic opinions and trying to protect their brands by voting the “right way.”

Since votes have been public, most ballots reflect the opinion that takes the least amount of mental gymnastics to arrive at. Statistically, neither Brunson nor Edwards have the two-way statistical excellence of Tatum—even with Brunson’s absurd scoring metrics—nor are they on more successful teams. The two easiest things to measure in basketball are consistent statistical performance and team record, both of which Tatum has the edge in.

Photo by Steven Ryan/Getty Images

In order to crown Edwards or Brunson over Tatum, one has to make a mental leap to consider things like “importance to team” or “dominance of public discourse.” I don’t think that’s how to do things, but let’s do it just for fun.

Brunson is probably the most beloved New York Knick since Patrick Ewing, and routinely makes his 4-year, $100 million contract look like the steal of the century. At his size and with his supporting firepower, it’s incredible how competitive the Knicks have been with the Goliaths of the NBA with Brunson at the helm. It may even remind some of 2016 Isaiah Thomas, also known as God’s Gift to Celtics Fans.

(Side note: Thomas just signed a playoff-eligible contract with the Phoenix Suns. Hell, yeah!)

Edwards, on the other hand, has produced more highlight reel dunks, more young Michael Jordan comparisons, and more “is he the next great American superstar?” podcast and TV segments than anyone else on the planet.

The poster he put on John Collins was probably the most diabolical thing I’ve ever seen on a basketball court, and it has all been multiplied by Edwards’ boundless charisma. How do you not like this guy? Well, probably by comparing him to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant so many times that whole segments of NBA media start a counter-revolution to protect the legacy of those two.

Photo by David Sherman/NBAE via Getty Images

In any case, national NBA media—the people who vote on this stuff—have definitely had more Edwards-based conversations than Tatum ones. Edwards has ripped off a stretch of awesomeness since Karl-Anthony Towns got injured that makes recency bias go berserk, but you can’t just ignore the first part of the season, and most voters won’t.

Moreover, Tatum has the glorious advantage of what I like to call the “Quarterback Quandary,” in which the best player on each team is held personal responsible for their team’s record. The name comes from the sad condition of NFL quarterbacks, who will have wins and losses pinned to their statistical performance, regardless of how well the other 51 guys play.

Tatum is the drum-major of a Celtics team poised to win a silly number of games, which as of this writing will be anywhere from 62 to 65. That’s awesome, and Tatum should and will get awards points for that success. Brunson’s Knicks sit in the quagmire of forty-something win East teams, while Edwards’ Timberwolves are tied with Denver for the number one seed. But both don’t approach Boston’s success, giving Tatum the benefit of the doubt.

And I don’t think that’s crazy, either. The All-NBA teams should be a snapshot of the season, which is why it was a crime against humanity that Brunson was left off all three last year. And it is patently impossible to snapshot this season without giving the Celtics their flowers one way or another. Tatum should—and probably will—be the richest recipient of them.

Next time, we’ll see who else should and/or will get some flowers. They won’t get quite as many as Tatum, but they might actually be somewhat cooler flowers. Like some really cool purple ones for Jaylen Brown, or maybe I’ll get Jrue Holiday a venus fly trap if we really want to mix it up.