BOSTON — Jayson Tatum is playing some of his best basketball of his career entering Wednesday’s matchup against Steve Kerr and the Warriors. The Celtics star will get a chance to make a statement against Kerr for the first time since Kerr’s surprise decision to bench him for two games against Serbia during Team USA’s run to the gold medal.
Three months after the ordeal that stunned a lot of people around the NBA community, Kerr acknowledged he did not have any regrets about the situation.
“We can’t control the story,” Kerr said before Wednesday’s game. “So that’s this job. I tell our players all the time, the NBA is incredibly popular, and the reason it’s so lucrative and a part of the deal is you’re gonna be in the story. So that can be tough. But from the beginning in Vegas the whole thing was we’re in this together. We’ve got 12 Hall of Famers and we’re just committed to winning, and we won a gold medal. So I don’t give it a whole lot of thought other than that I didn’t enjoy not playing Jayson against Serbia, not playing Joel against South Sudan. Those are not fun decisions.”
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Kerr went on to praise Tatum for how he handled the situation despite the unexpected adversity.
“Our guys were all amazing,” Kerr said. “They committed to each other, they committed to winning a gold medal, they brought the gold home for their country, they all handled themselves with incredible dignity and class. That’s the real story. But we live in a time where we have to talk about stuff that doesn’t actually matter.”
Despite Kerr’s explanation, the Celtics faithful likely won’t be seeing eye-to-eye with the Warriors coach in the wake of the move. That should lead to an unfriendly greeting upon his introduction in TD Garden on Wednesday night but Kerr was jokingly hopefully about a friendly reception.
“I don’t think anybody actually cared enough about me to boo me,” Kerr said. ‘But we’ll see how it goes tonight. But I’m sure also a lot of Celtics fans are gonna cheer me for being part of Team USA, winning a gold medal for the country. I’m a patriotic American, I love my country. Three Celtics on the team who won a world championship and two months later won a gold medal. Pretty incredible stuff.”
