Paul George set the Celtics’ franchise record for points in a debut Monday night. Nobody in Boston woke up today talking about that.
38 points. 12-of-21 shooting, 7-of-12 from three, five steals thrown in for good measure. That’s the best debut in a franchise that includes Larry Bird, and it now belongs to a 35-year-old Boston got in a change-of-scenery trade over the summer.
Great story. Won’t be the one anybody remembers from opening night.
Jayson Tatum went 6-for-23. He missed all seven threes he took. He finished with 13 points and 11 assists in 38 minutes. The assists aren’t a counterargument — only one came in the fourth quarter, when Boston needed him most and he had two points on 1-for-10 shooting.
Detroit erased a 22-point Celtics lead and won 121-113. Boston went 38-0 last season, playoffs included, any time it led by 20 or more. The last time Boston blew a lead that size was February 28, 2025, against Cleveland. This one goes right next to it in the group chat nobody wants to be in.
Twitter noticed before the final buzzer even stopped echoing.
Celtics just blew a 22 point lead in the second half 💀
NBA IS OFFICIALLY BACK 😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/NgT22ID0HD
— LakeShowYo (@LakeShowYo) October 20, 2026
That’s the whole vibe in one post, and it’s not even a Celtics account.
This was supposed to be the easy part of the question. Not whether Tatum can still be great, but whether he can be the best player on the floor with ten minutes left, now that Jaylen Brown plays in Philadelphia. Brown scored 19 points in his own Sixers debut against New York, which settles nothing about the trade after one game on each side. But Boston didn’t send Brown away to find out if Tatum could rack up assists for 38 minutes. It traded him to find out if Tatum could close. Monday, closing time was 1-for-10.
Vince Carter said the quiet part out loud on NBA Showtime: “When you lose a guy, a scorer like Jaylen Brown, I’m not going to use the word clutch, but he was a guy when Jayson Tatum was not playing well… You can rely on that guy. And tonight we saw PG be that guy, but when they started to take away PG, take away those looks, now Jayson Tatum has that opportunity. So for me, it’s who’s gonna be this consistent number two?”
Bill Simmons made the same point with less patience. On his BS Mega-Podcast, Simmons pointed to the fourth quarter as proof Tatum panicked and pressed when the game actually mattered — the exact scenario the Brown trade was supposed to settle before the regular season even got complicated.
Oh, and the NBA fined George $2,000 for flopping. Funniest subplot of the night. Still not competing for second place.
One game doesn’t make a season, and Tatum’s track record says this is the outlier, not the pattern. But Boston built its entire offseason around Tatum answering this exact question the first time it came up. The answer was six makes on twenty-three shots. Ask again in Game 2.
