Jayson Tatum keeps saying the same thing about the Jaylen Brown trade: he didn’t have a hand in it.
That has not stopped the speculation from piling up. The Celtics sent Brown to the 76ers for Paul George and picks, and plenty of people have tried to read Tatum’s fingerprints all over the move.
Some have argued there was a split between the two stars. Others have gone further and suggested Tatum wanted Brown out.
A few believe he had nothing to do with it at all. Most of the noise has landed somewhere in the middle.
Tatum, though, has been direct whenever the topic comes up. Brad Stevens has said the same thing from the team side: Tatum was not involved. Even with the way the NBA usually works, where stars are often at least looped in on major roster decisions, that remains the line coming out of Boston.
The rumor mill got another boost when Stephen A. Smith appeared on ESPN’s First Take in recent days and suggested the trade would not have happened unless Tatum wanted it. But the Celtics and Tatum have kept pushing back on that idea, and Tatum has continued to say he understood the business side of the league without having any say in the actual decision.
He also repeated that version of events in the latest episode of the miniseries following his offseason, The Summer of Jayson. Episode three, titled The Sit Down, shows Tatum describing how he found out while in Las Vegas after playing pickup. An assistant coach, he said, told him to cover his face and not react before giving him the news.
"Bro, we was in Vegas, I just got done playing pickup. Sham walked over.
He hand me the towel. He like, 'Yo, put this over your face.
Don't react. They just traded him (Jaylen).'
I'm like, oh sh*t. I'm like, where?
He said Philly. I said, "You traded him down the street?”
So I was just as much caught off guard as the rest of the world.”
That version of the story is hard to swallow for some people, and it’s easy to see why. When a 10-year veteran and an icon of the organization gets dealt, most people assume the franchise player at least knew a storm was coming.
Maybe he sensed Brown was being shopped. Maybe he had a feel for where things were headed.
But Tatum keeps saying he did not know when the deal would hit, or that it was coming at all.
For now, that’s the story he’s sticking to, and it sounds like he’s moved on. If he did not want Brown traded, there’s still the obvious question of whether he could have stopped it.
But as the Celtics put it into motion, he trusted Stevens and accepted it. That’s where things stand now, whether everyone believes it or not.
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