BOSTON — When the TD Garden announcer declared that Derrick White picked up a technical foul, the Celtics starter was immediately befuddled. He was confused as to why he picked up the tech as Jayson Tatum stood up from the C’s bench to celebrate the infraction.
The chaos was sorted through moments afterwards. Instead of a tech on White with 10:06 left in the Celtics’ win over the Suns, it was actually Phoenix coach Mike Budenholzer who was assessed the foul. Tatum was clearly frustrated by it, throwing a bench into the second row of the Celtics bench. He explained why he acted like that after the win.
“I’m no stranger to getting techs,” Tatum said. “D-White has never got a tech since he’s been in the league. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen the reference in ‘The Longest Yard’ and when they was doing the recruiting and Chris Rock was like, ‘Man, I got half a star.’ So I told D-White like, you gotta get one tech and get your street cred up. So I got excited when I thought he got a tech. I kind of campaigned for him to get one, one day. So we’ll see.”
Now, White does have a technical foul in his career — just one. It came on a play back on Jan. 22 against the Clippers. White went up to contest a shot and hit Amir Coffey in the face. So that was actually the first tech of White’s career after review.
But Tatum likely means he wants White to complain and earn a tech in a different fashion by jawing at the refs. As Tatum mentioned, he knows what it’s like to pick up technical fouls. He has a career-high 14 of them this season, two away from an automatic one-game suspension. Tatum also has 66 techs throughout his career.
Now, White probably prefers not to pick up those technical fouls. Each one of them costs $2,000 each to start and gets more expensive the more assessed over the course of the season. But it sounds like Tatum just wanted his pal to know what it’s like to give the referees an earful every now and then.
“It’s been a longtime discussion,” Tatum said. “We’ve been talking about this for a long time. I just heard technical foul D-White, so I got excited. I was going to go give him a huge hug or something.”
