Tatum Drops 36 and Three Straight Daggers on the Champs, Then Spends His Postgame Talking About a Cap Emoji

Jayson Tatum had the kind of night that should have owned the whole postgame. Thirty-six points, nine rebounds, seven assists, three steals, and the final three Boston buckets in a 107-103 win over the defending champion New York Knicks at TD Garden on Friday. Instead, a big chunk of his press conference went to a baseball cap emoji. Welcome to the first week of the post-Jaylen Celtics.

Start with the basketball, because it was good. Both teams lost their openers. New York fell to Philadelphia on banner night at Madison Square Garden, and Boston got run down by a Pistons rally in Detroit. Nobody in that building wanted to be 0-2. It was meeting No. 503 between these franchises, the most of any matchup in NBA history, and it was the first time in 53 years the Knicks walked in as defending champs. It played like April.

Tatum needed this one. In the opener he scored 13 on 6-for-23 shooting and went 0 for 7 from three. NBA.com dug up how rare that is: in his previous 602 regular-season games, he had only once taken 23 or more shots and shot that poorly, and even that night, an overtime loss to New York in 2021, he hit two threes. Friday, he missed his first three-pointer, then attacked the rim on his next two buckets and found it from everywhere after that. Fourteen for 26.

The Celtics built a 12-point lead in the second half. Neemias Queta's three-point play with 8:01 left made it 11. Then the Knicks did what the Knicks did all through their title run, ripping off a 16-5 run that cut it to one with under two minutes left. Boston was staring at a second straight blown lead. That's when Tatum took the game.

Bucket one: his drive got cut off, so he pulled it out, went to work on Josh Hart in the mid post, spun and buried a fadeaway 19-footer. Boston by three, 1:24 left. Bucket two: after a Karl-Anthony Towns offensive foul, he hit a deep corner two right over Hart. Up five, 49 seconds left. OG Anunoby made two free throws to cut it to 103-100. Everyone in the building knew where the ball was going. Tatum called for a screen, the Knicks switched Towns onto him on the left wing, he got to his spot behind the arc, pump-faked and dropped a three that touched nothing but net with 35 seconds left. Ballgame.

"You look at the stat sheet tonight, 14-for-26, 36 points, that's probably the game that everybody expects 82 nights a year," Joe Mazzulla said. "I'd be a betting man that he gets something similar to that most nights." With Brown gone, that's the job now: primary scorer, primary creator. Tatum's at nine assists a game through two, including four to Paul George, who dropped 38 in his Boston debut on opening night.

Side plot worth a smile: Mitchell Robinson, the guy who grabbed maybe the most famous offensive rebound in Knicks history to help clinch Game 5 of the Finals barely four months ago, played his old team for the first time since signing with Boston. Before the game he told Prime Video's Cassidy Hubbarth, "I love y'all, but tonight, we're not friends." He scored four points in 22 foul-troubled minutes, but in a 21-second stretch of the fourth he spiked a Towns layup and then hammered a one-handed alley-oop on the other end. "I've seen JT do that," Robinson said of the closing run. "To be on the same side as it ... it was mind blowing."

Now the cap. In a video on his YouTube channel, Tatum said he was "just as much caught off guard as the rest of the world" when Boston traded Brown to Philadelphia this summer. Brown answered on Instagram with a baseball cap emoji, which is slang for "that's not true." Asked about it, Tatum sighed and went for several minutes, according to The Associated Press.

"I don't have any animosity or beef, or ill will towards him," Tatum said. "I've got two kids. I reached out the day he got traded. I called, I texted." And then: "This ain't no Shaq and Kobe. There's no beef." He said he hates how the narrative got inflamed, that there hasn't been enough communication, and that "conversation would solve and put out a lot of fires." He is 28. Brown just turned 30. Tatum's point was they're too old to have their relationship litigated on the internet.

My take: I believe Tatum when he says he called. I also believe Brown when he posts a cap. Both things can be true when one guy got kept and the other got shipped out to trim one of two $300 million contracts off the books, which is how the AP describes the deal. Tatum wants the story to be the banner and the nine years. The emoji says Brown isn't there yet. They'll settle it on the floor eventually, and Tatum already told you what he thinks of the popcorn crowd: "This ain't no boxing match. Play basketball."

Knicks note: they're the first defending champ to start 0-2 since the 2011-12 Mavericks, and Mikal Bridges went scoreless, now 2 for 16 through two games. New York hosts Orlando on Sunday.