See more of our coverage in your search results.
Jaylen Brown isn’t buying ex-teammate Jayson Tatum’s reaction to his trade over the summer.
In an interview posted to his YouTube account, Tatum explained that he was “just as caught off guard as the rest of the world” when Brown was traded to the 76ers over the summer. Tatum claimed he was told personally about the trade by ESPN insider Shams Charania following a pickup game in Las Vegas.
“Shams walks over, he hands me the towel,” Tatum said. “He’s like, ‘Yo, put this over your face. Don’t react. They just traded him.’
“I said, ‘We traded him down the street?’” Tatum explained.
Brown commented a cap emoji on a clip of the interview, insinuating that he doesn’t believe that was Tatum’s reaction to the blockbuster trade.
Tatum also discussed his and Brown’s relationship after nearly a decade together on the Celtics.
“Every time I stepped on the court, that’s when it was time to go to war,” Tatum said. “I looked to my left and my right, and No. 7 was over there, I knew that he was going to do everything it took for us to try to win.
“The way we pushed each other, I definitely made him better, and he made me better. And we made our team better, we made the organization better. We won a championship. We are forever stitched in stone in NBA history. We held up that trophy. It won’t ever be forgotten.”
After news of the Brown trade broke, Charania reported on the state of Brown and Tatum’s off-the-court relationship.
“It is a tale of two different people,” Charania explained. “On the court, they were great, but over the last year or so, that personal relationship, it was as close to non-existent as you could have.”
At his 76ers introduction, Brown seemed unhappy with how the Celtics handled the trade and said he and Tatum had “not really” spoken since the trade went through.
Brown and Tatum won the 2024 title together, their second Finals appearance after losing to the Warriors in 2022. They never missed the playoffs in nine seasons spent together in Boston.