Jayson Tatum Avoids Jaylen Brown During Celtics vs 76ers Pre-Season Game Amid Social Media Silence

Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown built one of the NBA's defining partnerships over nine seasons. It led to a championship together in 2024, and that partnership ended this offseason when Brown was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, a move that stunned Celtics fans who assumed the two young stars would spend their entire careers side by side.

Saturday night brought their first reunion since the trade, at TD Garden, in a preseason game that carried more emotional weight than any exhibition contest usually does. It didn't go the way anyone scripted it.

Brown returned to Boston for the first time since the trade, and according to NBC Sports Boston's Abby Chin, he wasn't even on the 76ers' bench during the game, believed to be back in the locker room instead. The real story started earlier, during warmups, when Brown and Tatum shared the court without exchanging a single word.

Video from the arena showed the two working out in close proximity with no handshake, no nod, nothing that acknowledged nearly a decade as teammates.

Brown did complete an extended on-court warmup before being ruled out of the game entirely, along with LeBron James and Joel Embiid, who were also held out for Philadelphia.

Tatum, fully healthy and playing through his own recovery from last season's Achilles injury, suited up and scored 23 points as Boston routed the shorthanded Sixers 144-106. For Celtics fans still processing the breakup of their championship core, the lopsided score only sharpened the debate of the warmup snub.

The cold reunion fits a pattern that's been building since the trade was announced. Tatum has stayed almost entirely silent about Brown's departure publicly, offering only brief, non-committal comments rather than anything resembling a tribute to nine years as teammates.

Brown, for his part, has been more candid about the strangeness of the situation. He compared facing his old team to "running into an ex-girlfriend." Both suggest discomfort rather than open hostility, but the warm-up moment gave fans their first visual confirmation that something hasn't fully healed.

Not everything about Brown's return was cold. Several Celtics staff members reportedly approached and greeted him warmly during his workout, and fans in the crowd, many still wearing his old No. 7 jersey, called out to him from the stands.

It was specifically the Jayson Tatum relationship that stayed frozen. Whatever the real explanation, whether genuine tension, simple awkwardness, or two competitors not wanting to perform friendliness for cameras in a meaningless preseason game, the silence between them did what nine years of partnership never needed to: it became the headline.