Really aggravated me this year how Tatum was prioritized over Hayward. Hayward would be getting 21/7/6 plus somewhere else. Tatum is coming on like crazy so I gotta be happy but I think Brad is pathetic with delegating. We’re lucky Kemba, Hayward and brown are this unselfish. Brown or Hayward says a goal is to average 20 ppg? Oh my god people would lose their mind in Boston. They’d hate in them so bad.
There's 2 reasons for this:
1) Hayward has a more diverse skillset than Tatum at this point. He can thrive without scoring. He can run an offense and drive and kick to an open player much better than Tatum. Tatum is more one dimensional as a scorer but he's really good as a scorer. So it makes sense to have him focus on that and Hayward still adds value without needing to go 21/7/6.
Of course, it helps that....
2. Hayward is unselfish and doesn't really care that he's not featured as the star and needing to get his 21/7/6. I can't emphasize this enough, how rare it is to have a max type player (and we have two, with Kemba), who came here expecting to be the No2 option on the team behind IT, be willing to take a back seat to a young guy trying to make his name for himself. At this point in their careers, the league knows what Hayward is capable of for the most part. (Some Celtics fans have forgotten but I'm pretty sure the players have not). Like Kemba, he's made an All Star team, he's been the focal point of a team, here to win a championship. That's really what he has to prove to himself. He knows he can get those numbers if the team needs it. Tommy said at one of the Post Game segments, that Hayward knows his role on this team isn't to take the most shots, it's to take the right shots. Plus he's got paid already. Tatum is at that point in his career where he's trying to make that leap, to get paid, and to be the centerpiece of a team.
It's a sacrifice that Hayward and Kemba are making, to cop criticism from fans when they don't score in a manner fans deem to be befitting a max contract player. Not everyone can score 25 a game constantly, we saw 4 of them do that last week and what happened? Our bench got criticized for scoring 10 points. There's a limited number of points available for everyone. It's all about getting the right balance, making the right decisions, taking the best shot for the team.
And people tend to overlook this aspect of the game but there's more to basketball than just scoring, scoring is ultimately how the game is measured, but you have to play defense, screen effectively, create shots for others. How many of Tatum, Brown, Kemba and Hayward's points are due to Theis screening for them? How many are due to Marcus and Gordon creating scoring opportunities with their passing? How well are they playing off the ball. It's easy to create a scoring pecking order, looking at the hidden value other players add to the team is harder.
To me, the next stage of Tatum and Brown's improvements will be to make OTHER players better, by making better reads, drawing and passing better, creating for others, being unselfish. That's when they will hit that next level. Brown is kind of ahead of Tatum IMO in that respect. When Tatum is hot he genuinely feels like the best shot is his shot, like against LA in the 4th quarter when they locked him down by trapping him. But against Portland and Utah he did a much better job of getting rid of the ball when they trapped him and let himself be a decoy for others in the 4th. As he gets better at that, then we truly have an unselfish team where the best shot is one that the team collectively creates for one of them, and nobody on the other team knows where it's coming from.