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More appreciative of what it takes to win consistently, Jayson Tatum wants to turn the page for the Celtics

Justin Quinn
·3 min read
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“I think it’s tough, but now we need to regroup,” said Jayson Tatum to the media after the Boston Celtics dropped yet another winnable game late after blowing yet another big lead to the New York Knicks to lose 108 – 105 at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night.

“It’s tough losing leads and not finishing out the fourth quarter, but I think you’ve got to look at the big picture, and the grand scheme of things,” he added. The Duke product seems aware that his early successes may have given he and teammate Jaylen Brown a distorted understanding of what it takes to win at a high level in the NBA.

And now they are having to recalibrate on the fly while their team’s front office retools in a similar manner.

“(I) look back to those years when we were going to the conference finals, and it makes you really appreciate those moments,” Tatum explained, “because it’s hard.”

“It’s not easy, and I think early on, probably my rookie year, I thought that was just normal, winning all of those games, winning games in the playoffs, probably taking it for granted a little bit. But to enjoy those moments, stuff like this happens, and I think it makes you appreciate (winning) even more, knowing how hard it is to win.”

To hear the St. Louis native acknowledge this is not a minor thing.

Structural issues aside, one of the biggest issues with the team has been a waning urgency in the latter half of games that have cost this team more than a handful of contests the Celtics could have won.

And while awareness of a problem is only the first step towards fixing it, the realization of just how hard it is to win on a night-to-night basis with an 82-game season is not an unimportant development for the team.

“That’s on all of us to stop putting ourselves in that position,” offered Tatum.

The question moving forward is how to do that, and it may take help from the front office to get there, a topic there will be no shortage of articles about in the coming days and weeks.

This post originally appeared on Celtics Wire. Follow us on Facebook!

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