Jaylen Brown Answered Jayson Tatum’s Trade Story With One Emoji

The comment came from the verified fchwpo account, and it was one character long: a blue cap emoji, dropped under Bleacher Report’s Instagram repost of Jayson Tatum‘s new YouTube video. In the slang of the platform, the cap means the story isn’t true. A screenshot of the reply was circulating by morning, the verified checkmark intact, with 6,692 likes and more than 800 replies stacked underneath it.

Tatum’s video is the third episode of his “Summer of Jayson” series, posted Thursday night. He describes finishing a pickup run in Las Vegas when the news reached him — a towel handed over, instructions not to react, the words “they just traded him,” then the destination. “You traded him down the street?” he says in the clip. “So I was just as much caught off guard as the rest of the world.”

The transcripts don’t agree on who handed him the towel. Bleacher Report and NESN transcribe the towel-hander as ESPN’s Shams Charania; CelticsWire’s transcript names Celtics player development coach God Shammgod Jr. instead. The line everyone is quoting — the one Brown’s emoji sits under — is the one part of the account where the record doesn’t agree with itself.

Nine years get the most airtime in the video. “Talk about 2017-26. Jayson and Jaylen, like you won’t ever be able to talk about one of us without the other,” he says. “We won a championship. Like we were forever stitched in stone in NBA history. We held up that trophy. It won’t ever be forgotten.” The cap landed on the whole memory: nine years, one afternoon in Vegas, the championship.

The like from June is still on his account. Before the 2020 bubble restart he deactivated his Instagram to “minimize bad habits,” as he put it to NBC Sports Boston’s Chris Forsberg. Last June, with trade rumors swirling, he liked a comment under his own post from a fan hoping Boston would “do right by him by trading him to a city who respects him.” The like stayed up. This week it was the emoji.

On the iShowSpeed World Cup stream in July, Brown put it bluntly: “It’s a crazy business, bro. Don’t become a basketball player. There’s no loyalty, there’s no love…They packed me up, sayonara chat, I’m out of here.” His official statement on the trade ran the other way: “Saying goodbye isn’t easy when you’ve invested your heart into something. I’m big on respect and actions speak louder than words.”

The comment arrived the morning after the 29-point comeback. The night before the comment, Brown scored 21 points with eight rebounds and four assists in Philadelphia’s 114-106 home-opening win over Cleveland — 17 of them in the second half of a 29-point comeback, the largest in franchise play-by-play history and the first time in 66 tries a team erased a 20-plus halftime deficit to win its home opener. Tyrese Maxey led the way with 32. LeBron James added 17 and 10 in his Philadelphia debut. By the time the emoji went up, the team was 2-0.

On X, Ahmed/The Ears (@big_business_) read it cold: “Jaylen Brown just won a game coming back down 30 points and now he’s on IG calling Jayson Tatum a liar.” The @CelticsMuse account posted the screenshot with three thinking-face emojis. Under the carousels, the arguments split the way they always do: one side reading the cap as confirmation that Tatum knew, the other reading it as a player settling a score with an organization that dealt him to a division rival. Boston sent Brown to Philadelphia for Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks over the summer, months after the Celtics blew a 3-1 first-round lead to the 76ers in the playoffs.

Tatum and Brown will share a floor again on Nov. 10, when the 76ers host Boston in their first regular-season meeting. Brown finished last season averaging career highs of 28.7 points, 6.9 rebounds and 5.1 assists, an All-NBA Second Team selection who finished sixth in MVP voting. The Celtics and the 76ers had made only four other trades with each other before this one, in a history that goes back to 1963.