Kendrick Perkins thinks Jayson Tatum is an MVP candidate – but is he?

Superstardom seems to have come almost out of nowhere for Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum, and ex-Celt Kendrick Perkins thinks he’s a fringe MVP candidate. Is he wrong?

Former Boston Celtics center-turned-NBA analyst Kendrick Perkins thinks Jayson Tatum could be forcing his way into the MVP conversation — is that hyperbole?

The short answer is yes, but not by as much as one might assume.

The anchor of the Banner 17 crew may be getting ahead of himself, but his logic is sound, if a bit premature. Appearing on local sports radio talk show Dale and Keefe this week, Perkins was effusive in his praise for the third-year Duke product’s recent leap to superstardom.

“We [are] talking about a guy who could arguably be the second-best guy in the Eastern Conference right now, behind Giannis [Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks],” said Perkins. “And I’m watching this kid play and the things that he’s doing [are] on another level.”

Tatum’s play since being elected to his first All-Star game has truly been otherworldly. But does it garner league-wide MVP consideration? Perk believes it does, for one basic reason.

To the former Celtic, Tatum has already risen to become a top-ten player in the league, and from there, the leap to MVP candidate is more like a short hop. “At the end of the day, right now, we can’t name 10 players … better than Jayson Tatum,” argued Perkins. “So, to me, he’s in that MVP conversation.”

There’s a few things here we’d need to take at face value to agree with Texan big man here, chiefly that Tatum is a top-10 player, but also that by being such a player automatically grants one entry into the MVP race.

Given the latter is a largely subjective argument, we’ll focus on the former.

And rather than  throw more subjectivity at you, the reader, we’ll look at a few data points that relate to Perkins’ observations. The most important of which is where the former Blue Devil now sits on the two most-used MVP trackers — Basketball-reference.com’s and the NBA’s.

For Basketball Reference, Tatum does not appear on the list at all, which, presumably, also places the Celtic forward outside the league’s top-10 players. But the NBA’s — arguably the better-informed — does rank the Missouri native, at seventh behind the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic and just ahead of Los Angeles Laker Anthony Davis.

That’s a pretty serious nod, given there were many analysts legitimately calling for the 21-year-old to be included in a trade package for a player he’s now rated higher than, at least in this context.

The Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach notes Boston would have the NBA’s best offensive rating for the month of February with Tatum on the court — and its worst without him.

However, a strong counter-argument can be made that his absence from top-10 statistical categories of even the things he’s becoming quite good at (never mind basic counting stats) suggests that there’s still a bit more narrative than substance to putting the third-year player on such a high pedestal.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, as it often is.

But the fact that we are even having conversations like this is fabulously exciting for a Celtics fanbase still smarting from last season’s collapse. And the future for such a crafty, capable young player is truly hard to gauge given he’s already reaching heights many assumed were his ceiling.

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