Jayson Tatum Didn’t Hold Back When He Was Asked How He Deals With Trade Rumors

Despite the fact that the Boston Celtics are fresh off of an appearance in the NBA Finals and used this offseason to remedy some of the biggest issues on the roster, one of their two All-Star players saw his name pop up in trade rumors recently. According to reports, the Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets discussed a potential deal for Kevin Durant that would see Jaylen Brown headline a package going in the other direction.

Neither side agreed to anything, and there hasn’t been much movement on that front since the day that report went public. But in the immediate aftermath, Boston’s other star wing, Jayson Tatum, spoke out against them and made clear that he doesn’t believe those reports hold water. That continued to be the case earlier this week, when Tatum appeared on the Celtics Lab podcast and expressed his frustration with trade rumors as a whole.

“That’s the world we live in, right?” Tatum responded when asked by Justin Quinn how he deals with seeing them. “It always comes from an anonymous source, but it always makes ESPN or Twitter or whatever, and everybody sees it. So you never know what is true and what’s not true, but it gets people to talk about it, and I guess that’s the idea. They got what they wanted out of the deal — for people to talk about it and make speculations and this, that, and the third. If you pay attention to everything you see on Twitter or TV, you’ll drive yourself crazy. I think that’s just something that you have to learn just to keep your own sanity and your own peace. They will literally say anything, and some of it might be true, and then there’s other things that just couldn’t be further from the truth.

“But, the average fan at home doesn’t know the difference, and they just might believe whatever they see,” he continued. “And it doesn’t help that people on the sports talk shows talk about it every day and we don’t know who said it. So, just control what you can control, and that’s what I always kind of live by.”

It’s not rare for NBA players to express frustrations when they see trade rumors involving their team get kicked around, but even then, it’s interesting to see Tatum speak this emphatically on the subject.