The weightlessness of the early season and the ever-increasing rate of injuries can make it hard to sell a weeknight NBA game in November. There remains, however, a reliable shortcut between "box score I'll check in the morning" and "game I gotta watch live," and it is a route lined with beef.
Beef was not promised in the leadup to Tuesday night's game between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers, which pit former teammates Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum against each other for the first time since Brown was traded in the offseason, but a savory aroma was in the air. Brown's trade brought with it all sorts of thinly sourced reports about he and Tatum having a contentious relationship, and those suspicions were more or less confirmed a few weeks ago. On Oct. 22, Tatum posted on YouTube another episode of his self-produced documentary series. A clip of this episode, in which Tatum recounts the shock he felt when he found out that Brown had been traded—"You traded him down the street?" he says to the person who broke the news—was posted on Instagram, and in the comments section of that post, Brown responded with the "cap" emoji.
Brown was calling Tatum a liar, which was enough to elicit some direct questions about their relationship from reporters. "Jayson's a great guy," Brown said. "Like I said, great family, hell of a basketball player, hell of a 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."
Those comments gave fans plenty to chew on in the days leading up to Tuesday's game, and the broadcast cameras were locked in on Brown and Tatum before the opening tip. Tatum went out of his way to give Brown a friendly tap on the chest, and he was studiously ignored by his former teammate:
Not the most explosive interaction, but a representative one. It strikes me that both of these guys are being equally annoying in their navigation of this beef, but in opposite directions. Of course Tatum, who is so image-conscious that he developed a whole media rollout strategy for his reaction to the trade, wouldn't be caught dead showing anything other than deference and respect toward Brown. And of course Brown, who wants to wield the tools of the streamer and the poster without much of an understanding of how they work, would just kind of stand there, looking uncertain.
Anyway, that's about the only highlight either guy provided us with. They each had a nice dunk, but were both passengers in the Celtics' 123-101 win. Tatum looked comfortable scoring 21 efficient points, but it was Paul George's 36 points that carried the night. Brown, on the other hand, looked like a guy who was obviously pressing, and only managed 13 points while playing himself into foul trouble and making dumb turnovers. If nothing else, it was an objectively funny performance to watch after being told by ESPN that Brown was "approaching this with the intensity as somebody going to war."
What was sold as the latest chapter in a melodrama featuring two of the Eastern Conference's biggest stars turned into something much more boring and familiar. We were reminded once again that the Celtics are a deadly, whirring machine when their three-point shots are falling (they shot 22-of-49 from deep), and that Paul George fits just fine into the hole Brown left in their lineup. We were also reminded that for as fun as the 76ers can be, their halfcourt offense runs out of ideas pretty quickly, and that Joel Embiid has several stints on the injury report ahead of him.
The whole sleepy affair was enough to make one long for the days of Durant vs. Westbrook, which, despite being laden with its own meta-narrative baggage, at least delivered the goods. Those guys carried themselves like human beings, and weren't afraid to let emotion guide them when they got together—they even touched foreheads that one time. Perhaps NBA players are too algorithmically influenced these days to produce legible personal rivalries and risk swapping a little sweat, or maybe Tatum and Brown are just particularly ill-equipped for the task of beef-generation. Can Victor Wembanyama can sub in for one of them?
