Tatum, Smart radicals spark engine fueled by Celtics chemistry

As Boston prepares to take on the Miami Heat in Game 1 of the East Finals, the synergy created Tatum and Smart is set power the Celtics to a win.

While Jayson Tatum’s ascent to superstardom was by no means guaranteed, it’s less of a surprise to many than the growth of Marcus Smart as a dangerous offensive player.

Together, the Boston Celtics duo have acted as free radicals of a sort, creating intense chemical reactions as they orbit the stable nucleus of the Celtics in Gordon Hayward, Jaylen Brown and Kemba Walker.

It’s probably apt that the narrative surrounding these season’s Celtics has been one of chemistry; their synergy has indeed made them greater than the sum of their parts, at times flashing the sort of power only nuclear fission ca  create.

Ahead of their tilt with the Miami Heat in East Finals, head coach Brad Stevens was asked when he realized Tatum was a special player.

The Celtics coach was blunt in his response; “first time I saw him play college game,” came the reply.

“I’d say that that was the turning point in my mind because I had never seen him before,” added Stevens, perhaps realizing his interlocutor was likely hoping for more to work with. “Then it was pretty obvious. Dude’s pretty good, and he’s obviously just gotten better and better every single day.”

And while Tatum has done the bulk of that improving in the last six or so months, left to his own devices he can deactivate a bit, drifting back into a low-energy orbit when his teammates don’t reflect the same inertia.

This is where Smart is so critical; the Flower Mound native almost seems incapable of a stable orbit around the nucleus of the team, to keep this chemistry analogy going.

Combustion is his preferred state, and it shows.

Early in his career, he was chaotic, and dangerously so — his will to win a wrecking ball trying to make a sneak attack in a silent auction.

But then he learned to control that chaos, his combustion setting off a chain reaction with the rest of the roster.

“He’s always had a great feel for the game as far as passing the ball and knowing when to make the extra pass,” observed Stevens about Smart.

“He’s improved off pick and roll quite a bit over the last six years, and he’s improved in his shooting, obviously,” added the Indiana native. “We thought he was going to take a huge jump three years ago, then he had a couple of hand issues during the year.”

“But you could see it was coming, and in the last two years he shot it really well,” he added, that last bit just starting to be noticed by the wider world of NBA fans and non-local analysts alike.

It’s understandable that Smart had that unstable reputation; in his earliest years with the team, he was Schrodinger’s heat check (a deadly shooter who could salvage almost any deficit — or a lethal offensive player with his misses, the lethality unfortunately afflicting his own team.)

Now however, the Texan defensive menace has learned to create stable bonds with his less-reactive teammates at the same time Tatum has begun the upswing towards the peak of his own reactivity.

And with this kind of chemistry, there’s no telling where the experiment that is this season’s roster could take them.

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