BOSTON — This could have just been Jaylen Brown’s moment. For so long, outsiders saw Brown, the star who couldn’t quite lead a great team, as the second fiddle to Jayson Tatum.
But there he was, holding his NBA Finals MVP trophy, asked what it meant to him. Brown could have said anything in this moment, from a shoutout to the haters to a thank you to his family. But everything he has done with the Celtics, he’s done with his co-star.
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“I share this with my brothers and my partner in crime, Jayson Tatum,” Brown said before reaching to hug Tatum. “He was with me the whole way, so we share this s— together.”
The sacred bond of the Jays, as Jrue Holiday put it, wasn’t broken by failure. The Celtics tried repeatedly to build a champion with them and, eventually, around them, and kept falling short. But the team’s trust in the Jays, and their trust in each other, brought them Banner 18.
“We’ve just been through the ups and downs,” Tatum told The Athletic after winning the NBA Finals. “We’ve been through the highest of highs and some low moments. This is what it was all about.”
GOOD MORNING TO THE CHAMPS 🏆 pic.twitter.com/uFNrG8zxWx
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) June 18, 2024
They were the perennial runners-up. Could these two players, with all of their similarities, grow to complement each other while the public often tried to pull them apart? As they got closer to winning a title, the expectations rose.
Their narrative was long defined by internal competition, a debate of who could stake their claim that the Celtics were their team.
“Those (narratives) are always dumb,” said Austin Ainge, Celtics assistant GM. “It’s a team game. I know the media always tries to make it about one player’s legacy and that’s just not the reality every day when you’re trying to win games. That’s been true from Michael Jordan to Larry Bird to Bill Russell. Your supporting cast really, really matters.”
But their relationship went further back than Boston. They were teammates and even roommates at high school elite camps before they were household names. It took them time to jell once they were teammates in the NBA, especially when the locker room was split during the Kyrie Irving tenure.
“They could have fallen prey to all the media speculation, but they’ve always remained close and tight and mainly they want to win a championship,” Celtics governor Steve Pagliuca said. “You can see they play together and Jayson was thrilled with Jaylen getting MVP because he wanted to win.”
Years of coming up short pushed them to mold their play around each other and realize the value of their partnership. While most young stars are gifted time and patience, they were handed high expectations from the moment they entered the league. In Tatum’s rookie year, Brown’s second, the Celtics made it to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. They needed to get through those ups and downs to understand who they needed to become.
Tatum’s epiphany came against the Warriors in the 2022 NBA Finals, when Draymond Green kept trapping him in the gaps of the offense and taking him out of his game. So he went to his skills trainer, Drew Hanlen, and wanted to transform his game so no defense could stop him.
“I’m so consumed with basketball and trying to be great and win, I was just devastated,” Tatum told The Athletic. “Nothing else mattered but getting better and getting back to that point.”
At offseason workouts with Sixers star Joel Embiid, friends would ask them who was going to win MVP between the two of them.
“Jayson was like, ‘I don’t care. I just want to get back and win the finals,’” Hanlen said. “He became obsessed with not only getting back, but finally getting over the hump. It was really like nothing else mattered.”
He spent the summer learning how to play out of the post, beat different types of coverages, and operate as a playmaker rather than a scorer. He put his golf clubs in a closet and didn’t touch them throughout the summer.
By the time Green had to guard him this season, he was facing an entirely different player.
“It used to be you could be very directional with him and get him to go in certain directions and it would throw him off. You can’t anymore,” Green told The Athletic. “He’s just continued to grow and with where he’s taking his knowledge of the game and how he sees the court, it’s changed everything not only for him, but for his team.”
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In Game 5 of the finals, Tatum surpassed Kobe Bryant for the most points in the postseason by a player under 27 in NBA history. His magnum opus was 31 points, 11 assists and eight rebounds in 45 minutes Monday, as complete a game as he’s had on the biggest stage.
Tatum and Brown joined Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal as the only teammates to score more than 450 points in three straight postseasons. Tatum wanted to be like Kobe his whole life and he’s meeting the standard he sets for himself.
An ECF MVP, a Finals MVP AND A CHAMP 🏆 pic.twitter.com/SXa2ov078X
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) June 18, 2024
This moment brought Hanlen, who has trained Tatum since he was 13, back to when Tatum was a junior in high school and lost the state championship. To his surprise, Tatum was back in the gym the next morning. The offseason started right away. He was determined to use every day until the next title game to keep improving.
“The second time in high school, you got it done,” Hanlen told Tatum Monday evening, referring to the state title he ultimately won. “Now you got it done again.”
“I just had to look myself in the mirror and see what I needed to do to get us over that hump,” Tatum said. “I did that.”
Brown’s realization came a year later. The Celtics were in the midst of what ended as a failed comeback when Tatum sprained his ankle in Game 7 of the conference finals last year. It was time for Brown to step up, but he responded with eight turnovers.
“All of the moments where we came up short, we felt like we let the city down, let ourselves down, all of that compiled is how we get to this moment,” Brown said. “And it makes it feel even that much better that we had to go through all the journey, the heartbreak, the embarrassment, the loss, to get to the mountaintop.”
Just like Tatum a year earlier, he took that anger into the offseason and used it as fuel to refine his game.
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“This summer, he was obsessed. He was a madman,” said Malcolm Durr, Brown’s cousin and confidant. “It was that extra step of discipline and it made all the difference. He was really locked in and was like, ‘I was right there. I didn’t get the job done. It won’t happen again.’ And he did it.”
Brown often said he doesn’t care about the outside noise. But that is in part because he doesn’t hide from his faults.
He knew he was driving into the paint with blinders on. He could feel the ball slipping out of his left hand when he tried a dribble move in tight space. He had to become composed in every situation, just as Tatum had done.
As the season went on, Brown’s growth as a playmaker and defender became evident. The apparent weaknesses that marred his Game 7 embarrassment faded. The differences between his role and Tatum’s started to meld as Brown could handle more game management responsibility.
More importantly, their dynamic on the court became seamless. They willingly gave the ball up to each other and would go space the floor to give the other room to work. They mixed up crunchtime responsibilities more, focusing on whoever had the better matchup to exploit.
The perception Brown and Tatum were too redundant to work together was mistaken for so long, but now they had found a balance to handle each other’s responsibilities without stepping on toes.
“We’ve been through a lot, the losses, the expectations. The media have said all different types of things: We can’t play together, we are never going to win,” Brown said. “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.”
They had to step up when Joe Mazzulla took over as head coach in the wake of Ime Udoka’s suspension before last season, trying to bring stability to the franchise.
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“Two egoless stars that can play together and balance each other out the way they do, I think that’s priceless,” said former Celtics assistant coach Damon Stoudamire on Monday night. “Everyone has egos, but I don’t think they have egos towards one another. I think that allows them to see each other from a human perspective, so your ego gets stationary. I’ve always felt like it would work, but I think that winning a title justified it.”
They are just entering their primes and already have led one of the most dominant title runs ever. The Celtics had the third-best net rating in NBA history in the regular season, then lost three times on the way to the title.
With the right pieces around them, the Celtics became the best team in basketball.
After the game, Celtics governor Wyc Grousbeck pulled Brown aside with a simple message. “You took all the burden on your shoulders and you f—ing did it,” Grousbeck told him.
Brown responded, “Let’s do it again sometime,” with a wry smile. Now that they have broken this threshold and made a return to the finals, they don’t expect to stop anytime soon.
Tatum said they didn’t care who won Finals MVP because they knew they needed each other through this journey.
“They’ve taken a lot of the blame for why they haven’t had success, fair or unfair. So they’ve had to mature while being ridiculed in a lot of different ways,” Stoudamire said. “That right there brings guys together. The bond that they share for trying to get to the ultimate goal of success, you can’t break that.”
But Brown expects the doubters to come back next year. Now they’ve won it, can they win it again? Brown said he was ready to embrace that challenge.
Earlier this postseason Brown said they are, “Graduating, but we haven’t graduated yet.” In Game 3 of the finals, he told his team, “It’s time for us to graduate.”
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With the Celtics, your diploma hangs from the rafters.
“We’re in Boston. The goal is hanging up there,” Celtics assistant GM Mike Zarren said as he pointed to the championship banners. “I grew up here, there’s no measure of success for us other than that.”
Coming into this season, there were still questions of whether Boston would keep this core together if it came up short again. But now that they are champions, Tatum and Brown have made it clear their bond won’t be broken.
“I know everybody was wondering what would happen if we didn’t win,” Tatum said to the crowd at the post-championship party. “I guess we’ll never know.”
Get a copy of “Garden Party: Inside the Boston Celtics’ Run to the 2023-24 NBA Championship” The Athletic’s commemorative book about the Celtics’ 2023-24 season. Order a copy today for $39.95, plus shipping and tax. Books will ship August 2, 2024.
(Photo: Joe Murphy / NBAE via Getty Images)
