Celtics

Stephen A. Smith says 76ers ‘are winning it all’ if they drafted Jayson Tatum

"Just imagine... if Jayson Tatum was playing with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid."

By Tom Westerholm

May 20, 2021

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For both the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers, the 2017 NBA Draft proved to be an enormously pivotal moment.

The Celtics traded out of the No. 1 pick down to No. 3, where they knew their real target — Jayson Tatum — would still be available. In exchange, they acquired a valuable future pick from the 76ers.

The Sixers swapped with the Celtics, trading up to select consensus No. 1 pick Markelle Fultz. At the time, Fultz appeared to be a strong, sweet-shooting guard somewhat similar to a right-handed James Harden. The Sixers hoped to pair Fultz with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid to build an organic Big Three capable of carrying them into the future.

Four years later, the Celtics are clear winners of the deal. Tatum has morphed into one of the league’s premier talents. On Tuesday, he scored 50 points to lead the Celtics over the Wizards in an Eastern Conference play-in game. Meanwhile, Fultz struggled in Philadelphia with a mysterious shoulder ailment that cost him his jumper. He resurrected his career in Orlando and looked like a real contributor this season before he tore his ACL in his left knee, but the Sixers got very little from Fultz both on the court and in the 2019 deal that sent him to the Magic.

After Tatum cooked the Wizards on Wednesday, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith noted that the Sixers missed a real opportunity to do exactly what they hoped to do with the Fultz pick: Build an organic Big Three.

“That’s the dude that Bryan Colangelo got hosed by Danny Ainge over when the Sixers had the No. 3 overall pick and wanted to move up to No. 1 so badly to pass on Jayson Tatum and pick Markelle Fultz instead,” Smith said. “This is what we’re talking about here. Just imagine for one second here if Jayson Tatum was playing with Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. … They are winning it all. They are winning it all. That’s how gifted this kid is.”

It should be noted that Smith is using some revisionist history here. Fultz was the consensus No. 1 pick, and the Sixers (presumably) had no way of knowing how bad his jumper was at the time. Tatum, meanwhile, was a surprise selection at No. 3 — most mock drafts projected him lower in the lottery. The idea that the Sixers passed on him at No. 1 is somewhat unreasonable since nobody besides Danny Ainge considered Tatum a No. 1 pick at the time.

In retrospect that looks ludicrous, but the 2017 class was expected to produce several stars. Several stars did emerge from the class, but they weren’t the stars many expected. Fultz, Lonzo Ball, and Josh Jackson went 1, 2, and 4 respectively around Tatum. De’Aaron Fox is a good player in Sacramento, as is Jonathan Isaac in Orlando but the real highlights aside from Tatum are Donovan Mitchell (No. 13) and Bam Adebayo (No. 14).

The brightest part of the 2017 class, though, is Tatum. As Stephen A. Smith noted, Tatum’s brilliance puts the Celtics’s mediocre season in stark relief.

“When you have a talent like that in Jayson Tatum, when you see Kemba Walker show up and drop 29 as well and you saw what Jaylen Brown was doing before he got injured, what the hell were you guys doing being a .500 team?” Smith said. “Having a roller coaster ride that you went on? That’s not about talent, that’s about something else that was missing. So I walked away incredibly impressed with Jayson Tatum, a guy that is emerging as a star that I think is maybe a year away from being a flat-out superstar if he’s not already. He’s that special.”