Anthony Edwards made fun of a hairline. Jaylen Brown made fun of a man's children. One of those is trash talk and the other is a cheap shot, and half the internet can't tell them apart.
Start with what Edwards actually did. In mid-September, Adidas dropped a commercial for his AE3 shoe, a mock talk-show bit called "Minnatlantasota." Edwards used it to roast the league. He went at LeBron James with, "Speaking of old school, you see where big dog ended up? He was gonna join me in Minnesota, but I guess his knees couldn't handle the cold weather." He went at Brown with, "Philly got some of the best barbers in the world. Between him and ol' boy from Boston, they gonna have a lotta enhancements going on in the locker room," a callback to Brown's hair-product mishap from last season. He teased Jalen Brunson and LaMelo Ball too. Every one of those jokes is about basketball, geography, or a goofy haircut. It's an ad. It's supposed to make you laugh and buy a sneaker.
Brown took it somewhere else. On a Friday Twitch stream with Sixers guard VJ Edgecombe, he started reasonably enough: "That's f--ked up. AE, I thought you was my boy. Come on, man, that's crazy. We ain't doing that." He even floated the smart read of the whole thing: "Adidas wrote this for you, my boy? They wrote this for you? They're trying to drive a wedge between us." If he'd stopped there, he'd have won. Instead he kept going: "Adidas doing anything for my boy. They need to get my boy some condoms. They've got to get some AE some Adidas-sponsored condominiums, that's what we've got to do."
That line is a shot at Edwards' well-documented personal life, the child support cases that have trailed him. Brown reached past the basketball and the barbers and went digging in another man's family court file for a punchline. Edgecombe cracked up, the clip did numbers, but quotable isn't the same thing as fair.
Look at the move Brown made in the same breath, too. He accused Adidas of scripting a feud to split two friends, then turned around and threw the dirtiest haymaker available himself. You can't cry about someone driving a wedge and then swing an axe. If the ad was manufactured beef, the adult move is calling it out and moving on. Brown escalated into the nastiest territory he could find and took a victory lap for it.
None of this came from nowhere. Edwards named Brown as the player he wouldn't want dating his sister back at All-Star weekend in February, so there's history, and Brown's clearly been waiting to collect. Getting a receipt doesn't license torching the guy's kids for a stream clip.
People are getting this twisted. They love Brown's trash talk because he's genuinely funny and unafraid, and this offseason he's got material, having been shipped out of Boston in a trade ("Boston packed me up," as he put it) into a Philadelphia room that also added LeBron as a free agent in July. New team, chip on his shoulder, and the energy is great, even if the target wasn't.
The two teams don't even meet until January in Philadelphia, so there's no scoreboard coming to settle this anytime soon. Which means the only thing on the table right now is the joke itself, and the joke was beneath him. Edwards punched at a hairline while Brown punched at a nursery, and calling that the better bit says more about the people cheering than about either player.
