The silence between Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown was a story before either of them addressed it. When Brown returned to Boston with the Philadelphia 76ers for a preseason game in early October, the two former teammates warmed up at opposite ends of the court and never greeted each other. Now Draymond Green has offered his own take on what’s behind it.
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On his podcast, Green said what fans are seeing now is the result of conversations the two never had during nine seasons together in Boston.
“When I look at it now, it’s now festering,” Green said on The Draymond Green Show. “All of those feelings, you know, one guy could be looking at it like, ‘Man, I remember when such and such said this. Maybe he was feeling a way.’ The other guy could be looking at it like, ‘Oh man, I remember when this came out.”
“And so I think what you’re seeing now is probably just a culmination of all the years of people saying, ‘Oh man, they don’t get along,'” he added. “All of these things have now reared its ugly head, and they’re not teammates anymore,: he added. “They don’t have to kind of fake like they’re on the same page anymore. And they just move forward.”
Green thinks Tatum has moved on, but Brown hasn’t. In his view, Brown still “feels a way” about the trade and doesn’t believe Tatum’s claim that he didn’t know it was coming. That was the claim where the back-and-forth between the two started.
Brown left a cap emoji on an Instagram clip in which Tatum said he didn’t know Boston was trading Brown. After the Celtics beat the Knicks on Friday, Tatum responded.
“This ain’t no f—ing Shaq and Kobe,” Tatum said. “There’s no beef.”
His former teammate then answered after the Philadelphia 76ers’ win against the Bucks.
“I didn’t see the full thing, but I saw that he says there’s no beef,” Brown said. “And I think he’s right, there’s no beef. Jayson comes from a wonderful family; we’ve accomplished some great things. He’s a hell of a basketball player; he got a great PR team. There’s no beef, but it might be a little lamb chops and some gravy. You know what I mean? He should stay ready at all times.”
Green’s view is in line with nearly a decade of speculation about friction between the two stars, which followed them through five Eastern Conference finals, two NBA Finals and the 2024 championship.
After the trade, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that their personal relationship was almost non-existent.
Brown’s response did more to confirm Green’s take than Tatum’s own denial managed to. Brown wasn’t disputing the “no beef” framing. He coined it as technically true while making it clear that something sharper still exists beneath it.
For two players who spent nine seasons publicly insisting they were fine, Brown’s comment suggests that the version of events Green described – years of unspoken tension finally allowed to surface once the partnership ended – is closer to accurate than either player was previously willing to admit.