Jayson Tatum got a strange kind of recruiting pitch in the Bronx on Sunday night.
The Boston Celtics star was at Yankee Stadium for the final night of Jay Z’s three-night concert, and when he headed out afterward, a New York Knicks fan tried to sell him on a move to Manhattan in the most unfiltered way possible.
“We gonna get you on the Knicks, son,” the fan said. “We gotta get you out of Boston, they too racist out there.
Yo, we’re gonna get you out of Boston. You know they racist.
New York is racist too, but not like Boston n***a. I mean, brother.”
Tatum seemed to smile as he heard the pitch, which was probably not the kind of pitch he expected to get from a Knicks fan after a concert. Most fans in that spot would have leaned into the championship jab. This one went somewhere else entirely.
Boston’s reputation on this subject has been around for a long time, and several players have spoken about racist abuse there over the years. Tatum has said in the past that it saddens him, though he also said he has never heard racist abuse in Boston himself. He’s made his home there since the Celtics took him with the No. 3 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft.
The idea of Tatum leaving Boston is still far-fetched, and the Celtics have made that clear. He’s entering the second year of a five-year, $314 million contract, has never shown interest in leaving, and the team has never treated him like a trade piece.
That point was reinforced by NBA insider Shams Charania on The Stephen A. Smith Show, where he said teams recently checked in on Tatum and got nowhere.
“Over the last three, four weeks, while this Jaylen Brown stuff was going on, teams were calling the Celtics on Jayson Tatum,” Charania said. “Their answer was hard stop no.
We’re not trading Jayson Tatum. He’s untouchable.
He’s not on the table. Jaylen Brown, different story.
Open for business, ready to trade him, give us your best offer. So that’s the dichotomy of both of those situations.
“Just so we know from a reporting perspective, like they treated Jaylen Brown different than they treated Jayson Tatum,” Charania added.
That difference has been obvious for a while. Brown’s name has lived in trade chatter for years, while Tatum has not. Even Tatum’s torn Achilles in the 2025 playoffs and Brown’s sixth-place finish in MVP voting in 2026 didn’t change how Boston viewed the two.
There was real concern about how Tatum would bounce back from the injury, but he answered that in 2025-26. He averaged 21.8 points, 10.0 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 1.4 steals, and 0.2 blocks per game. Coming back that strong less than a year after the injury was no small thing.
So no, the Knicks fan’s pitch probably isn’t going to move Tatum. But it did give the Bronx a memorable moment, and it reminded everyone that Boston’s star isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
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