About 15 minutes after the Boston Celtics officially won their league-best 18th world championship, Adam Silver declared Jaylen Brown the 2024 NBA Finals MVP. Given that Jayson Tatum, an All-NBA First Team regular who finished Game 5 with 31 points, 11 assists and eight rebounds, is his teammate, it was a bit surprising. It was also tangential to the bigger story.
Standing 10 feet above a field covered in green and white confetti, Brown was mobbed by his teammates before Silver handed him the equipment. As they clapped and cheered, he raised it above his head: eight years of steady growth culminating on the grandest stage possible. ESPN’s Lisa Salters asked Brown what holding the trophy meant to him. “It was a complete team effort, and I share that with my brothers and my partner in crime Jayson Tatum. He was with me the whole way and we did it together.
The two embraced before Tatum repeated those words seconds later: “We know we need each other” – and then at his press conference later that night, making a point a point that has been lost to so many for so long. In a team sport, there is only one trophy that each player works for each year. Everything else is gravy.
“The main goal for us was to win a championship,” Tatum said. “We didn’t care who got the Finals MVP. I know I need him throughout this journey, and he needs me.
Depending on who you ask, this celebration at the pinnacle of the sport was either inevitable or implausible. For most of their careers, Tatum and Brown were seen as one of the most dazzling duos and most frustrating partnerships in basketball. Since being drafted two years in a row almost a decade ago, they have been questioned, doubted, and seen as two brilliant, if incompatible, talents. Despite Boston’s success, Tatum and Brown’s inability to overcome the odds and win it all led to frequent cries to separate them.
Throughout their 20s, Brown and Tatum had to mature in the face of championship expectations, annual disappointments and constant trade rumors. There have been countless mental mistakes and disappointments. Their friction on the ground was sometimes palpable. There were obvious advantages to overlapping positions, but the two two-way wings, who scored first, who wanted and needed the ball, struggled to share the load. The final step was their synchronous adoption of an altruistic mentality. To win it all, they had to have the exact type of series-clinching performance: 17 combined assists and just three turnovers.
The endless debate over who is better has never been relevant. Now it’s dead. The Celtics could not have won without the singular contributions of either star. Until Monday night, however, the biggest and most telling question was whether they could ever do what they had just done, together. Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White, Al Horford, Sam Hauser and just about everyone else who was in Boston’s regular rotation qualified as an ideal complementary piece. They all understood their roles and, on both ends, worked to accentuate the improved skills of Tatum and Brown. A top-down hierarchy existed on this roster, but, atypically for most champions, what made these Celtics so great was that they could also win without it.
During their seven-year journey to Banner 18, with a myriad of supporting cast helping and holding them back, Brown and Tatum ultimately found ways to develop each other and directly improve each other. Some criticisms were always unfair, even absurd. In a 30-team league, these two have won more games than almost anyone else. It is important. The perspective too. If you see a glass half full, you’ll be cheering for five conference finals in seven years. If that glass is half empty, their inability to win it all warrants crucifixion. Reasonable judgment lies somewhere in between.
Boston was ahead of schedule for its first two races. When he reached the 2022 NBA Finals, Tatum was only 24 years old and Brown was 25 years old. They learned about the particular scars that formed after that loss to the Warriors and then the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals – some colossal scars. disappointments that fueled enough cynicism to burn the entire era to the ground. As my colleague Zach Kram summarized well, the Celtics have won more playoff games in seven years than any team in NBA history that didn’t win a championship during the same period. But this year, Tatum and Brown refused to individually combat the NBA’s layers of complex defenses, preferring to balance aggression with patience and rarely running into a crowd just waiting to take the ball away.
“We’ve been through a lot. We have been playing together for seven years now. We’ve been through a lot, losses, expectations,” Brown said. “The media said all kinds of things: we can’t play together, we’ll never win. We’ve heard it all. But we just blocked it and moved on. I trusted him. He trusted me. And we did it together.
On Monday night, when the Mavericks left Brown alone, Tatum quickly read the coverage and handed him the ball:
Tatum and Brown created advantages, spaced the floor, changed screens competently, rebounded, and in many ways made life easy for everyone around them, especially each other. “Jayson, I can’t speak highly enough of his selflessness,” Brown said. “You know, I can’t speak highly enough of his attitude. It’s just the way he approached, not just this series or the Finals, but just the playoffs in general. And we did it together, as a team, and that was the most important thing.
Perhaps the most remarkable and impressive element of their eventual triumph was how they resisted a league-wide obsession with change. Sometimes a change is necessary — even the Celtics ultimately decided, reluctantly, to trade several key rotation players for Porzingis and Holiday last summer — but instead of moving on from Brown, Boston was determined to commit with him as Tatum’s partner. The winningest organization in NBA history essentially bet on itself and fully understood who the core team was. Really was and how continuity could work in its favor.
This is reminiscent of something the architect of this particular roster, Brad Stevens, said in 2021 during his first-ever press conference as the Celtics’ president of basketball operations. After completing a deal for Horford that cost the Celtics a first-round pick and Kemba Walker, Stevens made it clear what the motivation behind each transaction would be. “The ability to improve our wings is going to be a big part of the people around them,” he said.
Brown and Tatum were the cornerstones. Changes would be made to the roster, but all would serve to maximize their athleticism, skills and balance. On Monday night, as they completed the biggest game of their lives, one or other of Boston’s two best players was in line to win Finals MVP. Both deserved it. And neither of them cared. Everything they’ve done this season has been about Banner 18. Now, finally, with the monkey off their back and an open runway to build on what they’ve already accomplished, it’s their turn.