The story heading into next season with the Celtics is all about how Jayson Tatum will lead a new Celtics team as the sole superstar in Boston after Jaylen Brown’s departure.

We expect to see an already very involved Tatum be used more in the Celtics system next season, and that could be a very good thing as one specific stat suggests.

This Jayson Tatum Stat Could Be the Key to the Celtics’ 2026-27 Season

Joe Mazzulla, out of all people, is a stat guru, and we know he makes a lot of decisions based on advanced stats and trends his team provides him with.

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Well, this isn’t a stat that will shock you, but in the past few seasons, the more the Celtics have gotten Tatum involved on the offensive end, the more it results in the Celtics winning games.

We’re not talking about just a solid record the Celtics have when he’s very involved offensively. They win nearly all of them. There’s a stat to quantify how much a player is used when they’re on the court called USG% (Usage Percentage).

Basketball Reference defines it as “An estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while they were on the floor.”

In Tatum’s highest-scoring season (2022-23), his USG% was 32.7%, the highest of his career.

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The Celtics ultimately lost in Game 7 of the ECF that year, but it was still a great season overall, and Tatum was one of the top players in the league on a contending team.

The hope is he can do something similar, especially as we expect him to have a higher USG% in this upcoming season, with Brown gone.

Not only in the 2022-23 season did the Celtics win a lot of games when Tatum had a USG% in a given game over 33%, but the trend has applied to a few other years throughout his prime when healthy.

*Includes regular season games only when Tatum played (didn’t include the 2025-26 season due to him coming back briefly from his injury)

SeasonRecord: Games USG% >= 33%Record: Games USG% <= 33%2020-2111-923-212021-2226-1223-152022-2333-119-212023-2418-339-142024-2522-331-16

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Tatum averaged over 26 PPG in each of these five seasons, which I’d describe as his prime years so far, starting in 2020-21.

The USG% looked at here didn’t have a huge impact in the first year of his prime, but it started to improve in the following season and peaked in 2022-23.

Of course, other factors may have played into the games they won, but ever since the 2022-23 season (except for his brief end-of-the-season comeback this past season), the difference in records when Tatum has a USG% over 33% and under is night and day.

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The team was still very good when they used him less, but the record was nowhere near as good.

A combined record of 73-7 over the past three seasons when his USG% is over 33% is pretty remarkable, and is just as good as the Warriors’ in their record-setting season a decade ago (73-9).

Now, none of this means the Celtics are necessarily going to be as good, record-wise, as the 2015-16 Warriors, but it’s encouraging to see the Celtics’ winning output like this when Tatum has been a prominent part of the offense, which we’ll see in full swing for really the first time this season, with Tatum as the undisputed #1 option.

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