If you don’t want to admit that the regular season was a major success for Boston Celtics rookie Jayson Tatum, there’s no way you can argue with what he did in the postseason.

The No. 3 overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft averaged 13.9 points and five rebounds over 30.5 minutes per game in the regular season while shooting 47.5 percent from the field. But Tatum took his game to the next level in the playoffs, averaging 18.2 points on 46.7 percent from the field in 35.6 minutes per game.

The play of the former Duke star was a huge reason why the Celtics were one game away from the NBA Finals, even though they were without their best player in Kyrie Irving. Tatum had just two games where he didn’t hit the double-digit mark in points and finished up the postseason with 351 total points.

While that’s impressive enough on the surface, as The Athletic’s Jared Weiss revealed, Tatum fell just one point shy of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s rookie record for points scored in the playoffs.

For what it’s worth, Abdul-Jabbar did score his massive total in just 10 games, but this goes to show the type of potential Tatum has.

The rookie broke through in a big way during the postseason, and now he’ll head into the 2018-19 season as a key piece of an exceptionally loaded Celtics roster.