The Boston Celtics Hit the Snooze Button. Again.

Another listless Game 2 performance raises some uncomfortable questions for the Celtics. Is Jayson Tatum going to put his stamp on the NBA playoffs? Can the team sleepwalk to the Finals?

Jayson Tatum speaks softly, in a languid manner that registers as unplaceably familiar—like the muffled sound of a television news broadcast playing in the background of a mundane dream. There is a remarkably unremarkable consistency to his tone that almost takes you out of time. It could be Game 4 of the NBA Finals, it could be a regular-season game in the doldrums of March. In defeat, the message is always the same. We’ll watch the film. We’ll learn from this. We’ll be better next time. On Thursday night, after the Boston Celtics handed fans and detractors alike a 118-94 letdown in Game 2 of their second-round series against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Tatum conjured déjà vu once more. He held the same stoic expression for most of his time at the postgame podium, breaking only once, to let out a smirk when asked how the team might respond to the narrative chatter after such a “thumping.” (I totally get it, it’s a funny word.)

“Nobody in [the locker room was] defeated or deflated,” Tatum responded. “You never want to lose, especially in the playoffs. A lot of things we can learn from. We get it, right? The world thinks we’re never supposed to lose. We’re supposed to win every game by 25. And it’s just not going to be like that all the time.”

Tatum aimed to convey the team’s focus on the task at hand, but given the circumstances and the disaffectedness of Tatum’s delivery, it rang like sarcasm. It was Game 2 of the second round for a storied franchise that has made it to the Eastern Conference finals in five of the past seven seasons—of course the team wasn’t feeling dejected. Teams make a point of not getting too high or too low off any one experience, but the comment was notable. Excellence is its own inertia. After years of learning from this at the very highest levels of competition, what, if anything, has that education yielded other than the feeling of ennui? It’s the flip side of being there before that isn’t always acknowledged: It’s a virtue unless it isn’t. Because when you expect to be there again, you start looking for a fast-forward button. The Celtics play with the urgency of a team that’s set five contingency snooze buffers.

The Cavaliers took full advantage of Boston’s listlessness with an incendiary second half. It was the kind of game that could be flattened the way Miami’s Game 2 victory in the first round was: Cleveland hit a ton of 3s, and Boston didn’t. Chalk it up to variance, add fuel to the notion that these games ought to be seen as nothing more than manufactured adversity for a team preordained to reach the Finals. But in Kristaps Porzingis’s absence, the Celtics don’t have the top-end rotational superiority they’ve lorded over the league all season. And that leaves them prone to the will of the best player in the series: Donovan Mitchell, who has been undeniable over his past four games. Mitchell’s devastating crossover on Tatum into a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to close out the third quarter last night was a ruthless assertion of primacy.

We’re left wondering where that leaves Tatum, who is in the throes of the worst shooting postseason of his career. Nevermind the series, it would be difficult to posit that Tatum has been the best player in more than one of the seven games the Celtics have played thus far. Tatum’s 25 points, seven rebounds, and six assists in Game 2 isn’t nothing, but he’s yet to assert himself in the ways the league knows he can. When Tatum is on his game, he taps into a streamlined vision of his all-time hero in Kobe Bryant. In those moments, he holds this nuanced offensive command that seems to gloss over all of Kobe’s tortured on-court calculations—the ones that made the effortless feel effortful. Tatum needs just 28 points to overtake Paul George as no. 10 on the active playoff points leaderboard—everyone above him is at least six years older than he is. “I know how to score the ball,” he told reporters last night. But it’s been hit-and-miss over these past seven games. When Tatum isn’t fully calibrated, there is an excruciating lag time between his intentions and actions, as if he’s trying to manifest something that isn’t there. At worst, these aimless preambles in the midrange derail an offense designed to create open perimeter looks against tilted defenses. In those moments, he can charitaly be described as an unspectacular net positive, the kind of player that you’d compliment for their solid screens, stout defending, and underrated playmaking. Maybe good for a few Tommy Points, but not the stuff of legends.

If the overarching theme of this postseason has been the NBA’s new guard overtaking the old, Tatum’s presence has been conspicuously absent. Despite only recently turning 26, maybe Tatum ought to be considered part of a past epoch: He was a rookie when Boston went seven games against Cleveland in the 2018 Eastern Conference finals, the last time these two teams faced one another in the playoffs, back when LeBron was still a Cavalier. Tatum entered the 2023-24 season with the fourth-best odds of winning MVP; he finished sixth in voting. But in a moment when players like Anthony Edwards and Jalen Brunson are making folkloric ascensions, Tatum’s lack of eye-catching impact feels precipitous. His performances are in conversation with his contemporaries, in one way or another. When momentum stalls, you run the risk of getting passed by.

Tatum was asked after Game 2 what goes through his mind when Mitchell has these kinds of offensive outbursts against him—the question could be read as a proxy for the broader narratives of these playoffs, Mitchell a stand-in for all of the stars that have captured the league’s imagination up to this point in the postseason. “I don’t get into the one-on-one matchup, trying to outscore the other team’s best player,” Tatum said. “Just trying to focus on winning a championship.”

But we’re a long way away from that, and at some point, the Celtics will play a tightly contested game in which the disparity in 3-point makes won’t tell the story so bluntly. Perhaps the biggest frustration (or delight, depending on your spiritual proximity to Boston) is seeing the Celtics succumb to all the narrative pitfalls that were expected of them, as if they are squarely at the whim of some predestined future, both in success and doom. It’s a tedium that weighs on the Celtics more than every franchise in the league save for the Lakers—the reality of being inured to the conditions of prolonged success. It becomes hard to see the present as a unique set of challenges when it all feels reoccurring. The frustration with Tatum is a frustration with that inertia that has calcified around these Celtics postseason runs. But any solution would have to go beyond losing a Game 2 at home and getting punched in the mouth just to feel something. “We’ve bounced back plenty of times,” Tatum said. “We lost, what, 16 games this year? So I like to think that we respond pretty well, the few times we did lose.”

We’ll watch the film. We’ll learn from this. We’ll be better next time. A definitive response in Game 3 will be expected; it won’t be enough to shed the doubt. A break from their well-worn postseason malaise will require a fresh breath of the ecstatic. The Celtics can’t bore themselves into a championship. Not in this brave new era. Fair or not, the burden rests on Tatum’s shoulders to make good on that childhood dream of his—not only be like Kobe, but to be him. No one was better at magnifying himself in defining moments. We’re still waiting for Tatum to stake his claim.