BOSTON — One day after firing back against Brandon Jennings “soft” comments on Instagram, Jayson Tatum struggled through one of his worst performances of the year Friday night. The Celtics All-Star piled up a season-high eight turnovers while scoring just 15 points as Boston’s offense sputtered in the second half in a 114-97 loss to a red-hot Sacramento Kings squad.
After the setback, Tatum spoke publicly the first time after the back and forth with Jennings after the point guard had some pointed comments about the superstar.
“Yo, is he the softest Boston Celtics superstar ever?” Jennings asked in an appearance on Gilbert Arenas podcast. “… What do we know about Boston Celtics players? Like anybody that put on a Boston Celtics jersey from the 80s on up. They what? They cutthroat right? If you’re so tough, why you didn’t get Finals MVP last year? Why you let your running mate (Jaylen Brown) do it? If you so tough. If you so all this. Why you didn’t get it? Why you didn’t get it?”
Tatum hears plenty of criticism from all corners of the internet but rarely addresses any remarks head-on like he did with Jennings.
“I don’t know,” Tatum said when asked why he responded this time. “I had some time yesterday.”
When pressed about whether the comments irked him, Tatum remained coy.
“I wasn’t mad,” he said. “I just had some time yesterday.”
Tatum is on the verge of making his sixth consecutive All-Star game after winning an NBA title but did not expect barbs coming his way to slow down.
“Surprised? No. I think it comes with being one of the best players in the league,” Tatum said of the criticism. “And the more you accomplish, the more it gives people an opportunity to nitpick at things. If I wasn’t who I was or had a certain status, people would probably not talk about me as much. But I’m not the first superstar in league history to deal with this. It comes with it.”
Joe Mazzulla has tried to help his Celtics stars keep perspective by showing Tatum and Jaylen Brown how wrong the media has been about certain NBA stars over the course of their career.
“I guess it helps seeing it to put things into perspective,” Tatum said. “It’s (not) something that I didn’t already know. At the end of it, you can look at some of the ridiculous takes people on TV have said about some of the best players to play this game that didn’t necessarily age well. When you see some of the comments that they made about certain guys and how their careers turned out, you just gotta laugh. It’s just part of the journey.”
With the Celtics facing their first patch of adversity on the court for an extended stretch in the past two years (8-7 in last 15 games), more eyes will remain on Tatum to see how he leads this team in response. He didn’t look for any excuses after the team’s worst loss of the year.
“I don’t want to blame why we lost today on it being a trap game,” Tatum declared. “Everybody plays 82 games, everybody travels, everybody plays back to backs. So don’t really want to use that as an excuse. Just, observation, we got to be better in all areas of the game, … we just down the line, everybody, we just got to be better.”
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