Jaylen Brown Hasn't Talked To Jayson Tatum Since Trade, Wants to Focus on Sixers

Jaylen Brown sat alone at a dais set up at the Francis J. Myers Rec Center in Philadelphia. He was in front of a big blue backdrop adorned with 76ers logos with a nameplate in front of him, as if the people in the room didn’t know who was there to speak on Thursday afternoon.

Definitely going to take some getting used to pic.twitter.com/9JrjvfiJx1
— John Karalis 🇬🇷 (@John_Karalis) August 6, 2026

Brown is a Sixer now, which is still a weird thing to say even after a summer full of efforts by the Celtics to trade him.

“It’s been a lot of emotions … I’m still processing it to some degree,” he said. “I was [in Boston] a third of my life. I’ve met some people, some lifelong friends, people I’ll still be connected to. But [when] you’re starting something new, it's an end of something else. So this is just a process.”

That doesn’t mean the process has been easy.

“When I first got traded, I threw my phone across the room,” he said. He has hinted in the past that there is more to this trade in his opinion, but he hasn’t opened up about what that might be. Brown hasn’t been shy about suggesting things didn’t go how he would have liked, but it’s not something he wanted to elaborate on Thursday afternoon.

“My mind is so focused on what's in front of me,” he said. “To be honest, I'm moving on. Maybe one day I’ll share the details of how everything transpired and all the moving parts that took place in this. Obviously, it's a lot of speculation. I feel no need to chime in on it because I'm focused on what's in front of me.”

What’s in front of him is a team that, on paper, will be one of the favorites to some out of the Eastern Conference. Brown repeated many times that all he wants to do is win, and that how the team gets those wins doesn’t matter.

“At this point in my career, nothing else has really moves me,” he said. “I don't care about the MVP awards or Finals MVP. None of that stuff really moves me. It's nice, but the only thing that's gonna move me is doing something collectively, so a championship. So that's what I'm looking forward to.”

That will involve, at least to some degree, going through the Celtics. They will play at least four regular season games against each other (maybe another if the in-season tournament breaks right). It’s not often that an All-NBA player is traded to a rival in his prime, but Brown didn’t bite on questions revolving around motivation to beat the Celtics.

“It's just one day at a time,” Brown said. “That's all I got."

Brown did touch on his relationship with Jayson Tatum. He said he and Tatum haven't really spoken since the trade, which lends some credence to the idea that their relationship had maybe run its course. But he emphasized that there was no animosity between them.

“Anybody that you win a championship [with], you would think that's what a brotherhood or a lifelong legacy would entail,” Brown said. “Obviously, there's ups and downs in any type of relationship, for sure. But on my end, it's nothing but respect. Besides when he plays the Sixers, I hope he does well …everything for me is just based in respect.”

This will undoubtedly lead to one last day of debate on Brown’s way out the door, but Brown says he’s looking forward to figuring things out in Philadelphia now. Holding his introduction at a local community center is very on brand for Brown, who is carrying forward his promise to uplift communities he’s a part of. Maybe someday he’ll reveal whatever secret he’s keeping about how things ended with the Celtics. Until then, he’ll be wearing Sixers colors with his days in green a memory that fades into the background.

“I look back at the city of Boston, and I'm grateful,” he said. “I've been able to develop as a man, as a human being there, spend a lot of time in the community, a lot of time at university, studying, learning, figuring out how to approach how I wanted to go about my philanthropy, figure out how to I wanted to approach how to carry myself.

“A lot of my most important years, my most developmental years as a young man, I spent in Boston. I got there at 19. … I'm very grateful for my experience, my tenure in Boston. 10 years is a perfect cycle, perfect number for completion. We won a championship, and I have nothing but respect for the city of Boston, but now it's time to move forward a little bit.”

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