Over the last seven years, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum have led the Boston Celtics to five Conference Finals appearances along with advancing to two NBA Finals and winning the 2023-24 championship.

During this time, Boston’s superstar duo has been ridiculed and criticized by all the media outlets on if they’d ever be able to get the job done together.

For the most part, the narrative has been that Brown isn’t a good enough No. 2 for Tatum to win with. Brown’s eaten this up for years and turned it into winning MVP in the Conference and Finals.

Just about every year that Brown has been in Boston, he’s been the main subject of a trade to potentially upgrade Tatum’s partner, but the truth is, there isn’t a better running mate for Tatum than Brown.

Tatum’s never really been the centerpiece of this kind of conversation, but Brown showed up when it mattered the most throughout the playoffs when Tatum struggled the most out of the two.

In a recent interview with SI’s Chris Mannix, Tatum explained that he could’ve done a better job expressing himself in the public eye about his feelings about Brown as a teammate and his importance to the Celtics.

“I’ve always told him that maybe I could have done a better job of voicing my feelings in the public eye. He always knew that I wanted him here. I would always tell him like, ‘Man, I don’t get involved with any of those talks.’ I never went to Brad or went to any player like, ‘Yo, I want this guy in, I want this guy out of here.’ I show up and I want to do my job and play basketball. And looking back on in those moments, I didn’t know how that could affect somebody, because I was never in that situation. I feel like maybe I could have done a better job of publicly saying, ‘No, we don’t want anybody, we want JB.’ I just was always like, ‘I want to stay out of it.”

Tatum goes on to explain to Mannix that as the franchise pillars, the All-Star duo learned how to coexist with each other and that they need each other for the Celtics to be successful.

“We’ve figured out that we need each other. We have learned how to coexist. And we know we need to be the best version of ourselves in order for all of this to work… We want to be a great example of guys that play on both ends as a floor and guys who are the best teammates that we can be.”

As Tatum and Brown enter their eighth and ninth year in the NBA with the Celtics, the duo finally and fully understands their roles on the team and what they need to do to lead the team to success.

This is great to hear from Tatum, as he often doesn’t express himself about his teammates to the point where it’s suggested he doesn’t like Brown.

I think it’s fair to say that Tatum wants to put the narratives to rest on his relationship with Brown as a teammate and as a friend.

“I feel like he has gotten a short end of the stick, whether it’s All-Star selections or All-NBA. I feel like he, in a sense, made up for some of those shortcomings that people didn’t vote him for. I was happy that he got it.”

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