CelticsBlog Player of the Week: jumbo holiday spectacular edition

Happy New Year, CelticsBlog readers! We hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and we’re glad you’re joining us for more Boston Celtics coverage as the midway point of the season approaches. Invariably busy as they always are, the holidays prompted a brief hiatus for Player of the Week, so today, we’re doing a bit of catch-up. We have three weeks of Celtics basketball to cover, and we’ll be appointing a winner for all three. As a refresher, here’s what those weeks looked like:

Week #10: L vs Indiana (112-117). W vs Minnesota (121-109), W vs Milwaukee (139-118)

Week #11: W vs Houston (126-102), W vs LA Clippers (116-110), L @ Denver (111-123)

Week #12: L @ Oklahoma City (117-150), W @ Dallas (124-95), W @ San Antonio (121-116)

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so we’re going to skip our customary honorable mentions and jump right into it.

CelticsBlog Player of the Week #10: Jayson Tatum

3 GP, 37.3 MPG, 37.3 PPG (53% FG, 33% 3PT), 6.7 RPG, 4.7 APG, 2 SPG, +33

When you score a point per minute for an entire week while playing starter minutes, you’ve probably done pretty well for yourself, I think.

Tatum had himself a little bit of a tear in mid-December, recording five straight games with at least 30 points — three of which eclipsed the 40-point mark. It started with the comeback against the Lakers, and after sitting out the second Magic game, it peaked with his commanding 41-7-5-3 line against the Milwaukee Bucks.

That Bucks win was, of course, the cherry on top of this week. It’s the biggest win of the Celtics’ season thus far, coming at exactly a time in which the team desperately needed a lift, and Tatum’s 41 points were the key factor. He absolutely abused the Bucks on both ends of the court, trampling All-Defense guard Jrue Holiday — who, with Khris Middleton unavailable, largely served as his point-of-attack defender — while helping restrain Giannis Antetokounmpo to a rough-by-his-standards 27 points on 9-of-22 shooting, alongside a plus-minutes of -27.

Also worth mentioning here: Tatum is getting to the free throw line a ton. He attempted 34 freebies across these three games, and on the year, he’s taking nearly nine per game — easily outpacing his previous career-high of 6.2 (set last season). Combined with a career-best season inside the three-point arc and at…