Jayson Tatum Controversy Continues

Has it become a distraction?

The furor over Jayson Tatum’s second DNP continues. Bob Cousy weighed in with some harsh criticism of US coach Steve Kerr, saying this:

“Tatum is on the cover of Sports Illustrated this month. Any experts that I’ve read lately have chosen him in the top five, and sometimes No. 1 in the [expletive] world. Now Kerr is telling the world that he doesn’t agree. In a 40-minute game, if you can’t find five minutes to play somebody on the team without hurting yourself …

“When Kerr did it last week, he was in no danger of losing the game, but in this case they got down by 17 points and he’s got to worry about losing the game. And then to not let Tatum get off the bench — to me, there’s got to be some kind of bias that he’s got against the Celtics. He’s not alone there.”

He’s not the only Kerr critic. His Golden State star Draymond Green said this about his own coach: “Not playing [Tatum] was wrong. We all know it was wrong. He should’ve played. He didn’t… What I don’t like about it is, now to me it feels like a covering my tracks, proving a point type of thing to where, oh now Joel [Embiid] is out of the lineup. And then today, Jrue [Holiday] didn’t play… From the outside looking in, it comes off as, ‘We made a mistake as a coaching staff.’”

Dave Portnoy is so mad that he says he’s pulling for France Saturday. And to underscore the circus angle of all this, Tatum’s mother, Brandy Cole, has weighed in, which led to a savage response from former NBA coach and general hothead George Karl, who said this: “Am I really seeing Jayson Tatum’s mommy crying and upset about his playing time in the Olympics?!”.

For his part, Tatum continues to keep his cool. He commented on not playing against Brazil but we haven’t seen any further comments about the Serbian game.

For our part, while we’d love to see Tatum get more minutes, remember how Mike Krzyzewski handled such things when he coached the national team: he had his players vow to accept whatever role they had because the only goal was winning.

The US has a tough opponent in France Saturday and fans are wasting energy and potentially distracting the team. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.