Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown Put the Drama to Bed

Getty Images/Ringer illustration Both deserved Finals MVP. Neither cared. The growth and maturation of the Boston Celtics' dazzling wing duo delivered the franchise its 18th NBA title and proved that sometimes the best trade is the one you don't make. About 15 minutes after the Boston Celtics officially won their league-best 18th world championship, Adam Silver declared Jaylen Brown the 2024 NBA Finals MVP. Given the fact that Jayson Tatum—a first-team All-NBA regular who finished Game 5 with 31 points, 11 assists, and eight rebounds—is his teammate, this was a bit surprising. It was also tangential to the bigger story. Standing 10 feet above a court that was covered in green and white confetti, Brown was mobbed by teammates before Silver handed him the hardware. As they clapped and cheered, he raised it high over his head—eight years of steady growth culminating on the grandest possible stage. ESPN's Lisa Salters asked Brown what holding the trophy meant to him. "It was a full team effort, and I share this with my brothers and my partner in crime Jayson Tatum. He was with me the whole way, and we did it together." The two embraced before Tatum echoed those words a few seconds later—"We know we need each other"—and then at his press conference later in the night, making the point that's been lost on so many for so long. In a team sport, there's only one trophy that every single player works for each year. Everything else is gravy. "The main goal for us was to win a championship," Tatum said. "We didn't care who got Finals MVP. I know that I need him through this journey, and he needs me." Depending on who you ask, this celebration at the sport's mountaintop was either inevitable or implausible. For most of their careers, Tatum and Brown have been perceived as one of basketball's most dazzling duos and frustrating partnerships. Since they were drafted in back-to-back years nearly a decade ago, they have been questioned, doubted, and viewed as two shiny, albeit incompatible, talents. Despite Boston's success, Tatum and Brown's inability to get over the hump and win it all summoned frequent cries to break them up. Throughout their 20s, Brown and Tatum had to mature in the face of championship expectations, annual disappointments, and constant trade rumors. There were countless mistakes and mental letdowns. Their on-court friction was, at times, palpable. The positional overlap had obvious benefits, but the pair of two-way, score-first wings who wanted and needed the ball struggled to share the load. The final step was their synchronous embrace of a selfless mentality. To win it all, they needed to have the exact type of series-clinching performance that they did: 17 combined assists and just three turnovers. The incessant debate about who's better was always irrelevant. Now it's dead. The Celtics could not have won without either star's singular contributions. Up until Monday night, though, the more important and telling question had centered on whether they could one day do what they just did, together. Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Al Horford, Sam Hauser, and pretty much everyone else who figured into Boston's regular rotation qualified as an ideal complementary piece. They all understood their roles and, on both ends, worked to accentuate Tatum's and Brown's improving skill sets. A top-down hierarchy did exist on this roster, but, atypically for most champions, what made these Celtics so great was that they could win without it, too. On their seven-year journey to banner 18, with myriad supporting casts helping and holding them back, Brown and Tatum finally found ways to build each other up and directly make each other better. Some of the criticism was always unfair, bordering on absurd. In a 30-team league, these two won more games than nearly anyone else. That matters. So does perspective. If you see a glass that's half full, you'll applaud five conference finals in seven years. If that glass is half empty, their inability to win the whole thing justified a crucifixion. Reasonable judgment lies somewhere in between. Boston was ahead of schedule for its first two runs. When it made it all the way to the 2022 NBA Finals, Tatum was just 24 years old, and Brown was 25. They learned from particular scars that formed after that loss to the Warriors and then the 2023 Eastern Conference finals—a couple of colossal disappointments that fueled enough cynicism to burn this entire era to the ground. As my colleague Zach Kram neatly summarized, the Celtics won more playoff games in a seven-year stretch than any team in NBA history that didn't win a championship in that same span. But this year, Tatum and Brown refused to fight the layers of complex NBA defenses as individuals, instead balancing aggression with patience and rarely stumbling into a crowd that was just waiting to strip the ball. "We've been through a lot. We've been playing together for seven years now. We've been through a lot, the losses, the expectations," Brown said. "The media have said all different types of things: We can't play together, we are never going to win. We heard it all. But we just blocked it out, and we just kept going. I trusted him. He trusted me. And we did it together." On Monday night, when the Mavericks left Brown alone, Tatum quickly read the coverage and delivered him the ball: Tatum and Brown created advantages, spaced the floor, capably switched screens, rebounded, and, in so many ways, made life easy for everyone around them—especially each other. "Jayson, like, I can't talk enough about his selflessness," Brown said. "You know, I can't talk enough about his attitude. It's just how he approached, not just this series or the Finals, but just the playoffs in general. And we did it together as a team, and that was the most important thing." Perhaps the most noteworthy and impressive element of their eventual triumph is how it bucked against a leaguewide obsession with change. Sometimes change is necessary—even the Celtics ultimately and somewhat reluctantly decided to exchange several key rotation players for Porzingis and Holiday last summer—but instead of moving on from Brown, Boston was steadfast in committing to him as Tatum's costar. The winningest organization in NBA history essentially bet on itself and had a firm understanding of who the core really was and how continuity could work in its favor. It hearkens back to something the architect of this particular roster, Brad Stevens, said in 2021 at his very first press conference as the Celtics' president of basketball operations. After striking a deal for Horford that cost the Celtics a first-round pick and Kemba Walker, Stevens made clear what the motivation behind every single transaction would be. "The ability to make our wings better is going to be a huge part of the people that will be around them," he said. Brown and Tatum were the cornerstones. Changes would come to the roster, but all would be in service of maximizing their athleticism, skill, and balance. On Monday night, as they wrapped up the biggest game of their lives, either one of Boston's two best players was qualified to win Finals MVP. Both deserved it. And neither cared. Everything they did this season was about banner 18. Now, finally, with the monkey off their backs and an open runway to build on what they've already accomplished, it's theirs.

Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown Put the Drama to Bed

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