Isolation maturation: how Jayson Tatum’s iso game highlights his unselfishness

Personal improvement is such a bizarre thing. It’s almost like aging. It happens so gradually that the results never feel tangible — until you look back at where you were a few years ago. Professional improvement is much the same. It’s a rare skill indeed where once something clicks, you go from amateur to journeyman, or journeyman to pro. Skill level is a spectrum and even all but one of the world’s masters looks up to another.

Improvement is less like putting together a puzzle one piece at a time, and more like putting together several puzzles simultaneously with the final objective being to combine them into a collage at the end. Improvement and development are not linear. Instead, they’re a slightly inverted sine wave, and so is aging for that matter. Some days I still feel mid-20s (although those are becoming much rarer), and other days the stairs seem like an unconquerable burden.

It’s been a long development road for Jayson Tatum’s isolation game, but he’s worked very hard on the disparate puzzles he’s had to construct to get where he is now. Where is he now you ask? Well, he’s pretty good.

Last year, he ranked 42nd in the NBA at 1.01 points per possession, and the year before that, he was at 1.02. He’s never been a bad isolation player, but he’s never quite been elite.

Until now.

While it’s undoubtedly impressive, it’s driven by him hitting a much higher percentage of his 3s out of isolation and turning it over at a ridiculously low rate (4.1% of possessions to 6.5% last season). To me, the important development there is the lack of turnovers. These aren’t just a sprinkle of his offense either. Isolation possessions alone account for almost 30% of his offense, and if you include pick-and-roll ballhandler possessions (with passes) which often end in Tatum attacking a mismatch similar to an iso, that’s another 32% of his offense.