Jayson Tatum is Almost Back to Reshape NBA Landscape
It was always expected that Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton would both miss the entirety of the 2025-26 season after tearing their Achilles. Both went down late in the playoffs. Tatum was lost midway through the Eastern Conference Semifinals, and Haliburton went down in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
Haliburton is still expected to miss the entire season. What a difference a couple of weeks makes, though, as Tatum is potentially playing tonight. He is, at the very least, extremely close to a return to the Boston Celtics. It changes the entire NBA.
Jayson Tatum will change the NBA's playoff picture
The Boston Celtics are +800 to win the NBA Finals on FanDuel. Those are the best odds of any Eastern Conference team. They are already the second-best team in the East by record, and they have the second-best point differential in the entire sport.
They've done all that without Jayson Tatum, a four-time All-NBA first-team member. He's one of the best players in the sport, and losing him for the entire season up to this point has hardly impacted the Celtics.
It was bad enough for the rest of the Eastern Conference that the Celtics were still this good without Tatum. They brought in Anfernee Simons in the offseason, trading away Kristaps Porzingis. Now, Simons is gone, and Nikola Vucevic is in his place. It largely hasn't mattered. They're still elite and always have been.
Tatum will essentially have the last 20 games of the season as a ramp-up for the playoffs. He's highly unlikely to be playing big minutes any time soon, and the Celtics can afford to let him take it slow and work his way up to meaningful time on the court.
Think of it like a minor-league rehab assignment. To the major-league squad, the games don't matter, so they can let the player work out the kinks and get back to full strength. These games do matter, but Tatum's not going to hurt the second-ranked Celtics.
He's just going to take his at-bats, metaphorically speaking, and work up the ability to contribute to a playoff run. The Celtics were dangerous. Now, they're one of the most fearsome playoff opponents for any team in the NBA.
The East should be very afraid
There was always a chance that the Jayson Tatum-less Celtics were fool's gold. When the intensity is turned up a notch, can a team truly survive without its best player? The Celtics just got demolished by the Charlotte Hornets, who were on the road on the second night of a back-to-back.
That is a very plausible first-round matchup. The Hornets are surging, and they could end up winning the Play-In and getting the seventh seed to match up with the Celtics. They likely would've felt confident they could compete since they just handed the Celtics a 27-point loss in Boston.
But with Tatum back, the entire outlook changes. He's an All-NBA player, and adding him to an already-good team makes it harder to envision an upstart like the Hornets taking them down. That goes for the rest of the field, too.
There's a reason the Celtics have higher odds than the Detroit Pistons, who lead the East. The same is true of the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Celtics are right there in terms of quality thus far, and they're about to get back a true All-Star.
The Pistons are good, but can they continue their success against Boston if Tatum comes back? Probably not. Could the Cavaliers get past Boston as it is currently constructed? Maybe, but even the new-look Cavs would struggle with a Tatum-filled Celtics team. The same is true of the New York Knicks.
Suddenly, and for good reason, the Celtics are favored in the East.
