The Boston Celtics visit the Philadelphia 76ers on November 10, but Jayson Tatum already began playing defense against Jaylen Brown Friday night.
“This ain't no f---ing Shaq and Kobe. There's no beef,” Tatum said in response to a line of questioning about Brown. “It's not about that. It should be more praise. I understand that don't necessarily sell and drama gets clicks and views. But I'm not really into -- that's not my thing."
Let me spell this out for people who don’t know, and I’ll do it in a way that I hope captures the unbridled stupidity of this moment.
Tatum put out a video, sponsored by Dunkin, about his summer and his reaction to the Brown trade. In the video, after taking a nice big pull from some purple drink and setting the cup down so the logo faced everyone, Tatum said “I was just as much caught off guard as the rest of the world.” Brown hopped into the comment and left a cap emoji as a response, which is slang for lying.
What a perfect encapsulation of them both.
Tatum, perfectly put together, under perfect lighting, logos in clear view, gave a polished, self-produced explanation on October 23 of an event that was officially consummated on July 6. Brown responded in passive aggressive fashion, leaving an image of a cartoon hat, rather than saying what he means, or even reaching out to Tatum himself.
This is a very 2026 controversy. It’s also a very dumb one.
Tatum and Brown were never close friends, but they were never enemies, either. They had a very good working relationship for most of their time together in Boston. Brown would play with Tatum’s son on the court and in the locker room. They went at each other in post-practice one-on-ones plenty of times. They are different people, but they shared the same goals, and they made it work.
Things seemed to change last season. Whether it was how Brown handled the change in dynamic, how he was playing on the court, how much money he was going to want in an extension, or some combination of the three, the Celtics chose to trade Brown. Once they did, the relationship with Tatum was relitigated. And now that they are on opposing teams, Brown can drop whatever cordial efforts he was making.
Neither is completely in the right.
Jayson Tatum has already made nearly $210 million in his career and he has almost $260 million more coming in guaranteed money. That's like hitting the Powerball, then buying a lottery ticket nine years later and hitting it again. According to Forbes, he’s the 18th-highest paid athlete on the planet when you factor in endorsements. Does he need to make a sponsored, slickly-produced series about his summer where he delivers an answer to his feelings about the Brown trade that he had months to think about?
And Brown is one of the most highly-accomplished players in the league. He’s a champion, a Finals MVP, a multiple-time All-Star and All-NBA player who is clearly a first-ballot Hall of Famer. His hard work has been shutting up critics for a decade. And yes, there were still plenty of comments from the peanut gallery as his value was debated over the summer, but we should be past the point of extreme pettiness and burning bridges.
Last night, Tatum dropped the facade.
“I just think, especially in sports and in the NBA, I think sometimes there's not enough communication,” he said. “He just turned 30. I'm 28. I got two kids. It's just, as adults, just a conversation. I'm not going to say it's a bad one or anything like that. Just communication and a conversation usually -- you just get the right, wrong, you understand the other side. I think that's just like it's not done enough, especially in our business."
Tatum says he called and texted Brown the day of the trade. When Brown was introduced in Philadelphia, he said “nah, not really” when he was asked if he and Tatum had talked. And as Tatum noted in his postgame press conference, it’s fine that they still haven't. Everyone processes things like this in their own way. Brown is going to have to do what’s best for him.
And maybe Brown will just lean into what he always leans into at times like this. Joe Mazzulla has said multiple times that Brown actively seeks out slights to use as motivation, and if there isn’t one, he’ll manufacture one. Maybe he just needs to make Tatum and the Celtics villains in his eyes in order to compete against them.
If that's the case, then so be it. But it doesn’t make any of this any less stupid.
If two grown men can’t get on a call and figure out a way to move on, then maybe they should get on a call with a therapist to figure out how to become more mature about these things. The business of the NBA is a harsh one and players finishing their careers with one team is almost impossible at this point. If Brown can’t wrap his head around that, then that's on him.
At the same time, Tatum has to understand that his polished, sponsored, self-promotion isn’t always going to land with people outside of his adoring fan base. It comes off as rehearsed, and the cup of purple stuff next to him raises the question of how much of what he’s saying is scripted. It’s hard to see him as genuine sometimes.
The reaction to his comments Friday night should be a wakeup call to both of these guys. For Tatum, it’s that people reacted to them as ‘finally, an honest answer.’ For Brown, it’s that people said ‘okay maybe dial back the pettiness a couple of notches.’
It should not be lost on people that this came against the backdrop of Ray Allen and Paul Pierce both being at the game together. Allen’s falling out with the team was maybe the biggest dumb drama in team history. They weren’t sitting next to each other, but they’ve at least moved past the messiness of the breakup. It might not be Shaq and Kobe, but Tatum and Brown should do the same before it grows into that, and maybe not wait a decade to do it.
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