Just In: Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla’s eye-opening take on balancing Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown

On Thursday evening, Jaylen Brown and the Boston Celtics picked up a resounding win over Kevin Durant and the Phoenix Suns on their home floor of TD Garden. The victory marked the second Celtics’ win vs the Suns in five days’ time, and Brown put together one of the highlights of the season in the second half by stealing a pass from Suns guard Grayson Allen and then promptly dunking over the former Duke Blue Devil seconds later.

Over the last couple of weeks, Brown has been on a heater while his Celtics co-star Jayson Tatum has experienced a bit of a rough patch (although you wouldn’t know it from his performance on Thursday).

On Friday, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla got one hundred percent honest on how the shot attempts are divvied up between his two stars.

“If one of them’s playing really well, you want to keep that. Last night, we changed the sub pattern so that we could keep the matchups that we wanted later in the quarter,” said Mazzulla, per Celtics insider Bobby Manning of CLNS Media on X, the social media platform formerly referred to as Twitter.

One common criticism leveled at Tatum and Brown over the years has been that their games have too much redundancy to ever be compatible, but with the Celtics currently on pace to win 67 games this year, the two stars are letting the results do the talking.