A generation lost: after losing Len Bias and Reggie Lewis too soon, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum deliver on patience and promise

June 17th wasn’t just the 16th anniversary of the Celtics’ 2008 championship-clinching blowout of the Lakers. It was the 38th anniversary of the 1986 NBA draft.

That draft led to a photograph that I’m sure an entire generation of Celtics fans has come to view with a mixture of sadness and wistfulness. Here, in this photo, is one of the most tragic what-ifs in NBA history. With their pick, the Celtics chose Len Bias, a two-time ACC Player of the Year and Maryland senior, who died two days after the draft of a cocaine-induced heart arrhythmia.

One year after that draft, the Cs stole Reggie Lewis. Lewis played for Northeastern, not exactly a hotbed of NBA talent, and had gone to the NBA Draft combine while battling the flu. Twenty-one of the NBA’s teams looked at his performance there and his pedigree and said, “This kid can’t cut it.” Red Auerbach saw a kid who was determined to play no matter what.

Now, the 1987 draft produced three Hall-of-Famers, so it’s not like Lewis would’ve gone first in a redraft, but he might have. We’ll never know because a guy who was putting up Clyde Drexler numbers as the number two and three scoring option on the Celtics suffered a cardiac event during a pickup basketball game at Brandeis in 1993.

I can’t tell you what it was like to experience that as a fan, not because I wasn’t around for it, but because I was.

I wrote at Red’s Army about how Reggie Lewis was my Celtic.

My first years as a real Celtic fan were full of what-ifs, not triumphs. That 2008 title was sweet for me because it ended fifteen years of darkness. The C’s went from being a team that could have been great to a team that was great.

And then, thirty years after the Celtics drafted Len Bias with a pick acquired through a trade, they drafted Jaylen Brown with another pick acquired through a trade. Thirty years after they picked Reggie Lewis, they picked Jayson Tatum.

Maybe that’s been at the back of my mind whenever I’ve responded, at times almost viscerally, to calls to break them up.

Yeah, it took a while for everything to come together. There were times when I got frustrated with the Jays because they, well, acted their age. This one-and-done business has sort of turned college into a year abroad, rather than a sustained period of instruction in life and the craft of basketball, so I—and many of us—probably need to readjust our expectations of young men when they come into the league. Heck, I’m long overdue for such an adjustment, given that the one-and-done rule has been in place for going on 20 years.

Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

I winced when Jaylen Brown claimed that he’d have five or six NBA titles by the time he was 28, and I winced again when Jayson Tatum guaranteed a title at the 2019 All-Star Game, in the midst of a lackluster campaign. Like a lot of folks, I got mad when they seemed to buy into Tristan Thompson’s “The regular season doesn’t matter” motto.

But just as Brown and Tatum’s immaturity was often on public display, so was their growth. Not just on the court, but in their whole approach to the game.

The guys that won the title on Monday were far more mature than the kids who seemed to think that winning titles would come easily to them. They had been, to use a trite phrase, battle-tested, if not in the 2024 NBA Playoffs, then certainly over the past five years.

They learned to support one another. One of the biggest sources of gossip around the Celtics, and a reason that was occasionally put forward for the Boston to trade for, say, Bradley Beal, in order to keep Tatum happy, was the fact that Tatum and Brown were not BFFs off the court—and no surprise there, really. Where is it written that two guys who have the same job should have the same preferences for recreational activities outside of work?

Yet, they’ve learned something about supporting each other through the crazy life of a professional basketball player. It was a very introspective Tatum who said that the persistent trade rumors that used to circulate around Jaylen Brown always bothered him, before telling ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, “I think now that maybe I could have been better. I never said too much. I always have stayed out of that.”

As far as we know, there was never any friction between the Jays—they were just a couple young men who didn’t quite know how to be there for one another, or even that they needed to be there for each other.

Yeah, it took a lot of losing for them to get to this point—and there were times where you’d wish that the losing could’ve happened somewhere else, or to someone else, or that it wouldn’t have taken quite so much of it for certain lessons to take root, but you could always see the wheels turning, you could always see these guys moving forward, and you knew that it was just a matter of time.

Photo by Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Thirty years ago, there wasn’t enough time with Reggie. We caught a glimmer of what could have been with a player Brian Shaw called a silent assassin, a guy Michael Jordan said wouldn’t back down, someone well on his way to a Hall-of-Fame career, a player who made everything he did look easy, like he was still playing against college kids and not the best basketball players in the world.

We didn’t get to see anything of a guy Scott van Pelt said was, “like a fish story that was real.” Scott was at Maryland the same time as Bias, and he said. “Nobody could be like that, but he was like that.”

But we got to watch the Jays grow into greatness, something we were unfortunately denied thirty years ago.