Joe Mazzulla said Jayson Tatum didn’t have an injury at all.
The Boston Celtics then added Tatum to their injury report only a handful of hours before Game 7, listed as questionable.
And then Tatum didn’t play at all on Saturday night against the Philadelphia 76ers.
Clearly, it was a big issue for the Celtics’ chances of winning the game and keeping their season alive.
An unlikely source — Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio — also sees a bigger problem with it.
The reality, Florio pointed out in a new article on Monday, is that so much money is changing hands that relates to the outcome of these major league sporting events. And the fact that Tatum was seemingly hurt, but it wasn’t public knowledge until late, is far from ideal.
“Just last week, former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones pleaded guilty to charges arising directly from his mishandling of inside information,” Florio wrote. “Surely, others have done the same thing, especially since the moment sports betting became normalized and legalized. And so, at a time when the NBA is increasingly concerned about the impact of tanking on the integrity of the game, the NBA should be taking a closer look at ways to minimize the information that isn’t available to the public. The manner in which the Celtics handled Tatum’s injury reconfirms that the effort to keep the opponent in the dark keeps the public in the dark.”
There are layers to this, of course.
The first would be if they intentionally circumvented NBA rules about injury reporting. The league would have to figure that out.
And the next is whether anyone benefited from knowing Tatum’s status before the public did. That’s the worry Florio has.
Yes, it’d be a big deal for the 76ers to know Tatum wasn’t playing, but it’s a bit different than football — there are stretches every game where someone like Tatum sits out and a defense figures out its approach against the rest of the Celtics. It’s different than a surprise QB injury, which impacts every single play.
Still, it’s problematic, and it’s a hard situation to fully come to grips with. At this point, the Celtics’ season is over, but it won’t be the last time a team tries to keep injury information under wraps to maintain some kind of an advantage.