Jayson Tatum can be a bit of a slow starter but he looks to be finding his shot in this early NBA season. Tatum is one of the few superstars who doesn’t take days off and he should be ready to go on the Celtics’ second leg of the back-to-back against the Hornets.

When you look around the league there aren’t many guys you would feel comfortable guarding Tatum, and the Hornets don’t have one of those guys. The biggest thing for me to watch with superstars is single coverage rates, and yesterday the Hornets were giving Tatum plenty of 1 v 1 looks.

This led to a 32-point performance from the all-pro last night. He’s averaging the third-highest mark of any player at 30.2 points on the season and we love the narrative angle here.

If you didn’t watch last night, former team-mate Grant Williams committed an unnecessarily hard foul at the end of the game leading to an ejection, with tempers flaring from both sides. In a long season where games can sometimes feel meaningless, it’s always good to get one of the best players in the league in a spot where he’s motivated.

We are just a couple of games on from when Miles Bridges was benched after shooting 2/11 in 24 minutes against the Raptors. While he was inefficient, he bounced back last night taking 16 shots at 10 threes but only scoring 14 points. My logic here is pretty simple, if you’ve shown a consistent track record of dependable scoring then we’re going to trust you to bounce back at some point.

Obviously, these lines are going to be lower on a player when he’s going through a negative stretch, but they are still set on averages at the end of the day and we have a long sample size of success with Bridges before this season.

The primary scorers on this Hornets team are guards with LaMello Ball as the star of the show. The Celtics defensive guard rotation is one of the best in the league with Jrue Holiday and Derrick White making life very difficult for these guys.

We think they are going to need to focus more on their inside shooting and we’re expecting Miles Bridges to be a big part of that plan. If they want to keep this game close then he needs to be in the 20+ points range.

While we did take Jayson Tatum, he’s really the only veteran we have any interest in betting on the Celtics. They talked all off-season about letting their young core get more experience in games like this, and we think guys like Payton Pritchard should play some significant minutes unless this game ends up super close in the 4th quarter.

With a huge spike in minutes for a guy like Pritchard, there is going to be someone losing opportunities at his expense. We think Jrue Holiday is the guy who ends up taking the scoring hit at his expense.

While Jrue Holiday is one of the best defensive players and a true hidden gem in the play-offs, his skillset isn’t as aggressively needed in the regular season. He’s only scored more than 8 points in 3 of 6 games this season and this will be his first back-to-back of the year.

We think we can expect a decrease in minutes for the veteran defensive guard who isn’t looking to score much anyway. Betting on unselfish players is so much more fun when you’re on the under.