With multiple other Boston Celtics players now on the Team USA roster, Jaylen Brown is unhappy that he didn’t get the call too.
Celtics guard Derrick White was officially named to the U.S. Olympic team on Wednesday, replacing a former Finals MVP who had to withdraw thanks to injury. Brown, the reigning Finals MVP, was upset that he wasn’t chosen instead and took to social media to voice an apparent conspiracy theory about Nike.
After posting some cryptic emojis to X, Brown also said in a separate post, “@nike this what we doing ?”
@nike this what we doing ?
— Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO) July 10, 2024
Nike is a longtime (and perhaps the single most famous) sponsor of the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Brown, who isn’t currently signed with a shoe brand, has openly criticized Nike before over their supposed lack of ethics.
Since when did Nike care about ethics? https://t.co/f8t2eY994v
— Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO) November 10, 2022
It sounds like Brown believes that he is being intentionally excluded from the Olympic team by the powers that be at Nike. Those who agreed with him also pointed out that Dallas Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving, a former Nike athlete who was dropped by the company in 2022 and subsequently took some swipes at them, was not selected for the U.S. Olympic squad either.
Team USA’s pick of White was very defensible in the sense of getting a lower-usage role player in there to complement the murderer’s row of A-list talent that is already on the U.S. roster. But Brown seems to think that there is something more sinister going on. Coming off an NBA championship run in which he was named both Eastern Conference Finals MVP and Finals MVP, Brown, who has a strong history of social advocacy as well, feels that he met the criteria to be selected … but wasn’t.
