Jayson Tatum Has Officially Weighed In On The Jaylen Brown Trade Drama

Garrett Ellwood. Getty Images.

Pretty standard stuff here from Tatum. He's no dummy, he's been at this long enough to where he knows how to handle these situations. This recent Jaylen Brown drama is not the first time a member of the Celtics has been the focus of trade rumors, Tatum included. He handled that exactly how you would expect. Whether he feels differently or not, I mostly love how candid he is now when talking to the media. That's been one of the more fun parts of Tatum's growth outside of ya know, him becoming an absolute force on the basketball court (no, we're not going to talk about the Finals. Enough already, my heart is begging you).

I think my favorite part of that clip was the end

Like I said, these dudes have been through this stuff before, and at the end of the day what happened? Tatum and Brown have remained members of the Boston Celtics. Will that be the case this time? Who the hell knows. Personally I hope so, but anyone who tells you they know what's truly going on or what's actually going to happen is full of shit. We're all just waiting around for the Shams/Woj bombs to tell nus.

Where I do push back a little bit though is when Tatum says he doesn't make the roster decisions and just focuses on playing, etc. Uh, I'm pretty sure he has a fairly important voice in the decision making of the Boston Celtics. That's not to say he's LeBron or anything and actually runs the team and forces them to make terrible trades for his friends instead of something that would help balance the roster to prevent them from missing the play in tournament entirely, but as the franchise guy I don't think it's a stretch to assume that Brad/Wyc/Ime are involving both Tatum and Jaylen in everything. Do we really think if Tatum was adamant about not trading Jaylen they would? Or flipped the other way, do we think if he was adamant that Brad should do the trade, that Brad would not move forward with it? Of course Tatum plays a role in all this, even if it's a small one. That's how the NBA works in 2022 when you are a player of his caliber.

So while in year's past this feels like a topic that Tatum probably would have dodged and said mostly "no comment" I do think it's interesting that he didn't shy away from it, talking about how he loves the current team and all that. Yeah, we all knew that line was coming, but he could've easily just dodged the question entirely or had a completely boilerplate answer. Hearing those comments reminds me of what Tatum said to JJ Redick right before the turnaround back in February

If both Tatum and Brown are committed to Boston, which we have a pretty large body of evidence that suggests they are, I'm not sure we're about to see Brad blow this team up, even for a talent as undeniably awesome as a 34 year old Kevin Durant may be. I'm willing to admit that's largely my own personal hope, but I'm just here trying to add up all the breadcrumbs we're getting from reporters/players/etc in an attempt to understand what may actually be happening.

So where do we go from here? Back to the timeline of course. Sure we all have Shams/Woj notifications on but there's something about manually refreshing your timeline during a crazy trade rumor cycle that just feels different. We're basically all being held hostage by a Shams/Woj bomb that might never actually come. That's the life in the NBA in late July/early August and I'll be honest, I don't really care for it.