Jaylen Brown and polarizing former Boston Celtics star didn’t see eye to eye
Jaylen Brown told The Ringer’s Logan Murdock he didn’t see eye to eye with former Boston Celtics star Kyrie Irving when they were teammates during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons before the latter bolted for Brooklyn in the summer of 2019. Murdock interviewed Brown about his activism away from the court, and one of the main talking points was Brown backing Irving for sharing a link to an antisemitic film on the Amazon Prime platform.
“Me and Kyrie didn’t really see eye to eye when we was here,” Brown said. “Really at all.”
That adds up considering Brown was benched during the 2018-19 season in favor of Marcus Smart. Irving was absent for the entirety of the second half of the 2017-18 season, which enabled Brown to average 18 points and five rebounds during the 2018 postseason. Brown’s stats declined the next season, where he only started 25 games and saw his minutes per game average drop to 25.9 per game.
Kyrie Irving admits he went about Boston Celtics stint the wrong way
Coming off three consecutive NBA Finals appearances, Irving came to the Boston Celtics as an established star with a championship ring on his finger and one of the greatest Finals moments of all time under his belt. Because of that, Irving saw his individual goals as greater than the winningest franchise in NBA history’s goals — of course, a no-no for anyone hoping to have a long fruitful career in green.
Luckily, Irving sees the error in his ways, and takes responsibility for why those stacked Celtics teams of the late 2010s never achieved what many thought they could.
“Sometimes—and I could say this for myself—sometimes our individual goals are before the team goals, and he had to adjust,” Irving said. You think about our team. I want you to really look back at our team that we had and see how talented we were. And we had a lockup in every position. It was two, three guys in every position. So it was not only competitive with me and J.B., but it was competitive amongst all of us. And that wasn’t the best recipe for team success if you’re competing with your brothers every day.”
Irving’s tenure has been marred by a sour relationship between he and the city, and even worse, the “poisoning” of Jayson Tatum’s mindset.