Interesting trends in Jayson Tatum’s 3-point shooting for the Boston Celtics

Jayson Tatum is having a career year for the Boston Celtics in 2022-23, and at this point, is a lock for All-NBA. This has come despite facing some shooting woes from long-distance.

Tatum has declined slightly to 34.7% this season from 35.3% last season and added one more attempt per game. It’s not much a drop-off but it has been notable as he is getting more attention from the media and defenses alike, and it’s a continued decline over the last three seasons.

So what’s going on here? Is he just in a slump or is this a real weakness that might get exploited in a playoff series?

Trends in Jayson Tatum’s shooting for the Boston Celtics

The answer is a little bit of everything. Some things start to jump out when looking at his tracking data, especially when comparing the splits to previous seasons. On pull-up 3-point attempts, Tatum is hitting them at just under 30%, which is notably bad. Conversely, on catch-and-shoot threes he’s at 39.6 percent, well above league average. That’s not very unusual considering that catch-and-shoot threes are generally much more open shots per NBA.com’s tracking data.

Frequency wise, Tatum splits his long-range point attempts pretty evenly between pull-ups and of the catch. Where it gets interesting is when we compare to the 2022 season splits. His catch-and-shoot percentage is still high at 38 and his pull-ups are still low at 33.4; but he took about two more pull-ups for every three spot up shots that year.

In summation, this season Tatum shared his shot load more evenly up to this point in the year while adding more assisted shots this year. Combine all that while averaging one more three point attempt per game and the variability starts to look very reasonable, particularly when considering diminishing marginal returns common for any performance indicator. He’s shooting more off of assists and about the same off of pullups and it’s all aggregating to about the same as last year.

Now, when looking at his shooting decline on the whole over the last several years the answer is more complicated. 2020 and 2021 were both very strange seasons. In 2020 the pandemic shut everything down and the playoffs finished in the bubble; and 2021 had virtually no fans and most all of the league shot better on average. The only real trend we can see is that since he became “the guy” for this team that’s when he started to go from above average to about average three point shooting, which makes sense.

Basically, this is all a fancy way of saying Tatum’s shooting is fine. Could he benefit from a for more open looks? Absolutely, who wouldn’t? But when it comes playoff time other teams are going to know that too and they’ll clamp down on him on multiple levels.

Make no mistake, the Boston Celtics will need Tatum to step up his accuracy once the play-offs start, that’s what stars do and what he did last year. He ratcheted up his efficiency when it was needed the most, bringing his long distance percentage to 39.3.

This year could be different, it could be worse, it could be better. The important thing is that he keeps shooting, and he shows no signs of slowing down.