The other day I was messing around on Basketball Reference as I tend to do when I’m bored at work and I noticed something crazy. I somehow ended up on Jayson Tatum’s page and saw his ridiculous shooting percentages and stats.
He shot 43% from 3, had a nearly 54% eFG%, and also a 58.6 TS%. That is ridiculous for a player of any age, let alone a rookie. So that made me think how his shooting held up against other rookie seasons. In order to do that I used Basketball Reference’s Season Finder tool to compare other players’ rookie seasons to Tatum’s by using his stats as a baseline.
I started off with these 4 stats because I really wanted to see how his shooting held up but I didn’t want just every random sharpshooter to show up so I included his points and rebounds as well. I also only used people who qualified for 3P% leaderboards which means it eliminates people who took four 3’s all year but made two. Another piece of criteria that was not shown was age. For that I put ages 18 to 23 as the range which I felt was fair since you really shouldn’t have a rookie season outside that range.
As you can see Jayson Tatum is the only player in the history of the NBA to average 13 PPG and 5 TRB while shooting 43% from 3 and 53% eFG. But I didn’t want to just stop there, I also wanted to see how far ahead he was of the next most efficient rookie season. So in order to do that I kept points and rebounds the same but kept decreasing 3P% and eFG% until someone else showed up. Then someone finally did…
To my surprise the only other player to come close to what Tatum did as a rookie was my favorite player ever: Paul Pierce. Even then he still shot significantly worse, but he did put up more points and rebounds. I still wanted to see what other possible legends were alongside Tatum in these categories so I kept searching and I kept broadening my criteria.
The next person to show up on this list was another Celtics legend in Larry Bird which just made me start to think that I run Basketball Reference. In all seriousness though this is a ridiculous trio of names to be included in. And Tatum isn’t just included in this list, he shot much better than them. I’m not saying he is going to be better than these guys or the best shooter of all time, I just did this little exercise to show how historically efficient he is and how scary he can really be. The efficiency might not stay put at this ridiculous level, but if it drops just a little while increasing his usage he would be one of the league’s best players.
P.S. – At the end of this I broadened the criteria to all NBA seasons and not just rookie seasons.
There have only been 12 other seasons where someone did what Jayson Tatum did in his ROOKIE season. There were only other 11 players to do it total since Otto Porter did it twice. This kid is a fucking star.
The Wise Guy 