Jayson Tatum, #0, Boston Celtics, (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
The Whiteboard is The Step Back’s daily basketball newsletter, covering the NBA, WNBA and more. Subscribe here to get it delivered to you via email each morning.
Basketball Twitter can be a petri dish for absurd ideas and yesterday’s obsessively dissected hypothetical was the random idea of Jayson Tatum on the Phoenix Suns. On the All The Smoke podcast, Tatum said that he’d been hoping the Suns selected him in the 2017 NBA Draft. The Suns held the No. 4 pick and ended up taking Josh Jackson.
The Celtics, famously, traded out of the No. 1 pick. That let the 76ers move up to the first slot to select Markelle Fultz, while Boston picked up some future draft assets and still landed the player they really wanted all along — Tatum — at No. 3. The Lakers selected Lonzo Ball at No. 2.
As an aside, this draft looks increasingly bizarre in retrospect and our NBA network had a lot of fun redoing it.
The Celtics had their eyes on Tatum so there really isn’t any path for him to have slipped to fourth and gone to Phoenix. However, Earl Watson, then head coach of the Suns, talked to The Athletic and it sounds like it wasn’t going to happen anyway.
Watson wanted Tatum badly enough to hold what he called “uncomfortable” conversations with team owner Robert Sarver, trying to convince the organization it should do whatever it took to draft the Duke star. Sarver preferred Josh Jackson, Watson said, but Watson kept pushing back with a different idea. “We need to fucking get Tatum,” Watson recalled saying.
Watson’s version of the story also includes the numbingly horrific story of Sarver interrupting an epic performance by Tatum doing a shooting drill at his pre-draft workout to ask, “what else can you do?”
But, suspending disbelief, if Tatum had somehow ended up in Phoenix in 2017 it sets up a fascinating alternate timeline. Devin Booker would have been headed into this third season with Tatum by his side, and that was the year he really took an enormous leap in scoring volume, efficiency and playmaking ability. It’s the one that set him up on a star trajectory. While a Booker-Tatum pairing might not have had much appeal to Sarver, it’s indisputably attractive on paper.
Tatum might not have followed the same growth trajectory in Phoenix as he did in Boston, but we’ve seen that he has All-Defensive team potential on the wing and his shooting and creation ability makes him viable as a primary or secondary creator. It would have given Booker a higher-quality offensive support system than he’s seen at any point in his actual career and bolstered the Suns’ defense in all the ways the Josh Jackson selection was supposed to.
In this timeline, the Suns probably improve enough that selecting Deandre Ayton doesn’t happen but Booker and Tatum are at least as compelling as a core. And, perhaps, in this timeline, Dragan Bender’s talent is realized with a bit more scaffolding. Or the Suns are in position to add someone like Wendell Carter Jr. or Michael Porter Jr. in the 2018 Draft. Maybe they’re still in the lottery for the 2019 Draft and adding someone like Tyler Herro. Or maybe they’re attractive enough to land some quality free agents and pivot fully into playoff mode.
There are infinite variations on this theme but there are two rock-solid takeaways: 1) Booker would have gotten a lot more from Tatum than he did from Jackson and 2) Robert Sarver is ridiculous.
#OtherContent
I’ve wrapped up my rookie review series for Nylon Calculus with lessons from Zion Williamson’s 19-game rookie season. Zion led the league (by an enormous margin) in shots in the paint per 36 minutes but very few of them were “self-created” in the traditional sense. Among his incredible talents, his ability to make himself available at the rim might be the most important.
Ahhhh, who could forget the brilliant light of the Larry Hughes era for the New York Knicks?
The Detroit Pistons have slowly restocked their young talent but they are still, at best, mostly high-level role players. If Blake Griffin isn’t the star to hold this core together then who is?
If the Knicks are making a trade this offseason (whenever the heck that is) it may require moving Mitchell Robinson, the one really attractive trade chip they hold right now. If they have to make that kind of move, could they find an equally appealing center option in the NBA Draft?