Jayson Tatum Discusses His Time At Duke
Pretty fun and ineresting stuff.
Jayson Tatum has had a big year in a lot of ways - he was an All-Star again, he won the NBA championship with the Boston Celtics, he signed a massive new contract extension, he’s on the cover of NBA 2k25 and he won a gold medal in Paris, even if he didn’t play as much as he might have liked.
He sat down for an interview with Jason Bensinger and his time at Duke came up.
There’s a great passage about Mike Krzyzewski’s visit to his mother’s house when he was in high school and some more on how Krzyzewski motivated him.
He also tells the locker room lockout story - after a loss at UVA, Coach K put trash bags in front of everyone’s locker and told them they didn’t deserve to be at Duke (we’re thinking that Jay Bilas told a similar story).
On another occasion he called him a “soft-ass kid from St. Louis and that if he had known he was so soft he would never have recruited him.
At the end, he says that choosing Duke was the best decision of his life. He goes on to echo a famous Krzyzewski-ism, that he wanted to be part of something bigger than himself.
It’s a pretty great little clip and highly recommended.