Fewer pump fakes from 3 to step into long 2s would be nice. But to play devil's advocate: Tatum doesn't have a great first step. If he made himself into an elite mid-range shooter in the Kawhi mold, a ton of drives would open up for him. That's an incredibly tall order, but it's not out of the question.
We've seen a lot in these playoffs how useful it is to have a player who can hit mid-rangers at a good clip when the games slow down and points per possession drop against locked in defenses. It's a lot harder for regular season 3-point success to translate when defenses are flying around and closing out hard. Portland and Toronto only advanced because CJ and Kawhi were able to get 2-pointers in some real rockfight game 7s.
Part of the issue was that JT was so good at catch and shoot last year that teams gameplanned to run him off the 3P line.
From
this article: Last year, over 26% of his shot attempts were spot-ups with an EFG% = 67.7%. This year, spot-ups accounted for just 20.8% of his attempts as he replaced those with significantly more pull-ups, which yielded a 39.9 eFG% on 41.4% of his shots.
Also, JT is 21 so you wouldn't expect him to be very good at isolation - and the stats bear it out, being the lowest rated iso scorer (.63 PPP) of any player with over 2 iso plays a game - but if he can grow his game to include iso scoring at an average clip, he be an All-Star. If he can grow his game to be an above-average iso scorer, I would think he would be a perennial All-Star.
Youth is wasted on the young . . . .
