For most of us, a six-week honeymoon sounds like an eternity to celebrate. For Jayson Tatum, however, it must have felt like the blink of an eye.

Tatum went to bed on June 18 on top of the world, soaked in champagne and smiling through cigar smoke, after helping lead the Boston Celtics to a record 18th NBA title. Hoisting the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy for the first time was the golden exclamation point of a season for all eternity – the culmination of everything he had worked for his entire life.

By the time he arrived on July 28, however, that exhilaration had long since evaporated. He had spent the opening game of the 2024 Summer Olympics sitting and watching the rest of Team USA defeat Serbia – a DNP-CD in red, white and blue; his honeymoon in Paris was over before it even began.

Two weeks later, Tatum came home from France with a second gold medal… and a whole host of mixed emotions to deal with.

He had just made his fifth consecutive All-Star appearance and earned his third consecutive All-NBA First Team selection; just led Boston in points and rebounds And assists on the way to championship; just became the sixth player to average 25 points, nine rebounds and five assists per game in a title run; just signed the biggest contract in NBA history.

He was also coming off one of the worst cold snaps of his career when he shot 28.3% from 3-point range and went 0-for-16 on jumpers with Team USA in the playoffs; just spent his summer watching and hearing every bit of slander thrown at him in TV debates, podcasts and social media; has just been unceremoniously relegated from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the pecking order, with grenade-throwing pundits declaring him not only, without any consideration, the best player in the NBA, but perhaps not even the best player on his own team.

“I've got two (gold medals) now, I've got a championship and things don't necessarily go the way you expect, right?” Tatum told Jared Weiss of The Athletic in August. “I learned to say, 'Okay, that's part of it.' You move on.”

This is what the next step looks like:

According to Cleaning the Glass, the Celtics enter Wednesday's Eastern Conference Finals against the Pacers 4-0 and are easily the No. 1 offense in the NBA. They outscore their opponents by nearly 24 points per 100 possessions during off-hours. (And there's been a lot of garbage time – 16 minutes worth, even by CtG's somewhat generous estimate.) Like last season, there are plenty of reasons for this, from Jaylen Brown's driving to Derrick White and Jrue's clamping Holiday to flamethrowing backup point guard Payton Pritchard.

And yet, like last season, the main reason Tatum is off to a great start – 28.5 points, 6.8 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game, shooting 62% on 2-pointers and 42 % shot on 3-pointers, with a 22- assist-to-turnover ratio of 6 – and he looks very much like a player ready to ascend to the sport's finest world.

Only 25 players in NBA history have made five All-Star teams and three All-NBA First Teams and won a championship And was named the league's most valuable player. Twenty of them are already in the Hall of Fame. The other five – Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Nikola Jokić and Stephen Curry – will join them once they become eligible for enshrinement. The only thing keeping Tatum off this list at just 26 years old is an MVP trophy. So why not strive for it?

“As a child you set yourself a lot of goals. “I've been very fortunate to check off a lot of things that I wanted to accomplish, things that my favorite players have accomplished,” Tatum said after the Celtics beat the Wizards last week, according to Bobby Manning of Celticsblog. “Saying MVP is important to me in no way diminishes the success of our team. Anyone who has ever won the MVP title was on a team that competed for the championship.”

The defend Attacking Champion C certainly qualifies for the latter, and Tatum has seemingly entered his eighth season with the intention of renewing his candidacy for the former. He proclaimed with authority that he beat the Knicks with 37 points and 10 assists on opening night before leading a 20-point win over the Wizards. In the first two games, he didn't have to score a single second in the fourth quarter.

He couldn't break through early against a spirited Pistons team…so he simply took the lead and scored another 37 goals in 38 minutes, capped by a stepback dagger with 29 seconds left and the game-winning free throws. Even when his jumper didn't fall Monday against the Bucks, Tatum found other ways to contribute, getting big men Brook Lopez and Bobby Portis into shape down low, keeping the ball moving without forcing the action , and scored a game-high plus point. 18 in an 11-point win.

“Dominating all facets of the game,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said when asked what he expects from Tatum. “I think just his ability to do what he does as far as his shots and finding the shots he wants to make are the best for him (and) the best for our team.” Rebounding at a high Level at both ends of the floor. High level defense and playmaking. … He has the ability to impact the game in different ways and that should be the norm.”

Tatum has long nailed the quieter components of these contributions: He's capable of playing in a variety of defensive roles, from more skilled swingmen to 7-footers; Elite Defensive Continuous Rebound Rates for a Forward; Continuous increases in mapping the pitch, manipulating coverages and delivering the ball to teammates to put them in position to cook. But where he fell short of MVP frontrunners like Nikola Jokić, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Dončić and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in recent years was in the shinier elements: cooking yourself, at high volume and high efficiency.

Related: Through four games, Tatum has made 66% of his unassisted shots and has a true shooting percentage (which takes into account 2-point, 3-point and free throw averages) in excess of .640, which would shatter both of his previous career highs miss. He leads the NBA in pull-up jumpers, making two-thirds of his pull-up twos and 42% of his off-the-bounce triples.

According to Synergy Sports, he's 15-of-27 (55.6%) in isolation and is averaging an outstanding 1.39 points per game after one-on-one play – the league's best in Week 1. On plays where Tatum shoots directly out of the pick-and-roll or passes to a teammate who does, Boston scores just under 1.39 points per possession – fourth-best among 91 players who have recorded at least 15 such plays.

Tatum can't suddenly turn into a 7-foot, 280-pound walker. He cannot magically develop a level of court vision and game-playing acumen that only a handful of players in the history of the sport can match. It's possible that, given the remarkably eye-catching individual numbers of some of his colleagues, somewhat reduced counting stats from a significantly better team with a handful of top-50 players will keep Tatum on the fringes of the MVP conversation rather than in the center of the picture.

However, this stellar start offers at least one more possibility: that a version of Tatum that continues to trade mid-range Js for 3-pointers seems consistent with Mazzullaball's tried-and-true principles, continues cashing them in with increased frequency, and this Also, the tune of the best volume and efficiency in the career of once again the NBA's best team could lead to a case too compelling to dismiss.

“When you're an MVP, you dominate, you're efficient, you play the right way and you influence the win,” Tatum said last week. “You can do both.”

Right now, Tatum is doing both and the Celtics are looking like the class of the NBA again. If he keeps it up and they take it back, the next honeymoon will last a lot longer.