Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum’s championship run with the Celtics was supposed to lock in a bond that lasted well beyond the confetti. Instead, the relationship has apparently cooled to the point where the two are barely speaking after the breakup.
On a recent segment of NBA Today, ESPN’s Malika Andrews described what she learned in Philadelphia for media day. She said she asked Brown whether he had talked to Tatum since the exit, and the answer was essentially no.
“I was in Philadelphia for media day,” said ESPN’s Malika Andrews. “I asked Jaylen Brown whether or not he’d spoken to Jayson Tatum since the exit, and he was a little bit murky, but the essence was: ‘No, not really. I went my way, and he went his way.'”
Brown and Tatum entered the league a year apart and spent years growing together as players and leaders while the Celtics stuck with the pairing despite constant outside pressure to split them up. In 2024, they joined the list of championship duos and secured their place in Celtics history.
But the road that followed has looked messy. Tatum’s Achilles injury is widely seen as the moment that started the chain reaction, giving Brown a chance to step forward as the team’s top option and creating a shift in the pecking order. Brown also added fuel online when he went on a livestream and voiced frustration about not getting the credit he believes he deserves.
Those factors, alone or together, could have influenced Boston’s decision to move Brown, though the Celtics likely still needed approval from their star player to pull it off. Tatum didn’t push the team into the move, but he also didn’t stop it, which has led to speculation that he wasn’t opposed to the trade. He has also said very little publicly about his former teammate, offering only a modest statement to acknowledge their decade together.
Their first on-court meeting since the split did little to calm that narrative. During NBA preseason last week, the two were expected to at least exchange the usual warm pleasantries. Instead, they barely acknowledged each other while warming up on opposite sides of the court.
For two players who won so much together, that’s a jarring ending. The old Celtics duo once looked like the kind of partnership that would outlast everything. Right now, though, there’s no sign they’re interested in repairing it.
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