Remember the early-season criticisms from Marcus Smart which pertained specifically to Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown passing the ball more?
Yes, they’re far back in the memory of many Boston Celtics fans along with the players themselves. That’s been quite apparent recently with the Celtics winning nine of their last 10 games before the NBA All-Star break.
Nevertheless, Tatum offered some real insight into how the remarks made him feel and the immediate fallout when the Celtics star appeared on “The Old Man & the 3” podcast co-hosted by former NBA player JJ Redick. While Tatum expressed publicly in November that he wasn’t upset about the comments, his interview on the podcast added further insight.
“It caught me off guard, for sure,” Tatum said on the podcast. “I think what you have to, I guess, understand I think with being in the NBA is — especially sometimes after, you know — we had just blown an 18-point lead or something to Chicago. This was the beginning of the season, we probably like 2-5, everybody was frustrated. We were all on edge a little bit.
“So when I (saw) it, I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t mad or anything. I just waited until the next day. I saw (Marcus) Smart at the facility, and we sat down and talked. And I think it was a very, it was a great talk, actually. We had some time to sleep, the adrenaline was gone from the game. And he apologized for what he said, and, you know, that it was something that he should not have said in the media, and they got his words mixed up or whatever. And I didn’t take offense.
“I started it off by saying, ‘Listen, bro, I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. I still have got a long way to go from where I’m trying to get to. But I think we ended the conversation on ‘We in this together. We’re all on the same team and we’re trying to figure it out.’ Obviously saying certain things like that in the media doesn’t help anybody’s case because obviously that’s all they talked about for the next week or so when they was referring to Celtics. But it wasn’t the end of the world. No harm, no foul, and we’re past it now.”
Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens hinted at the fact that Smart and Tatum talked about the incident the following morning, as well.
The C’s, who flirted with .500 throughout much of the first half of the season, turned it on over the last month while going 15-5 down the stretch. Boston now is in sixth place in the Eastern Conference (4.5 games back of the top seed) entering the post-NBA All-Star break.
