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Jayson Tatum and the art of getting to the free throw line

Jayson Tatum is very good at basketball. It shouldn’t be, but it feels necessary to remind people of that. All too often, discussion around Tatum focuses on minor annoyances and ignores that he’s a 6-foot-9, 20-year-old basketball savant who creates offense for himself at a high level and generates massive impact as an off-ball defender for a legitimate Finals contender.

He’s not perfect though. Tatum has flaws. Most notably and controversially, his shot distribution this year has fluctuated somewhere between abysmal and simply bizarre. Tatum’s mid-range heavy apportionment of shots (he’s in the 89th percentile in mid-range frequency among forwards) has proved a burden on his efficiency, his true shooting percentage falling to a barely-league-average 55.