Boston Celtics win over Milwaukee is proof of concept for Joe Mazzulla

Beating the Bucks isn't a big deal anymore, but how they won the game is exactly how Joe Mazzulla said he wants his team winning games at the beginning of the season.

Jan 23, 2026; Brooklyn, New York, USA; Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla coaches against the Brooklyn Nets during the fourth quarter at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-Imagn Images | Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Joe Mazzulla knew right away what his team’s weaknesses would be, and what he would need them to do to overcome them. 

The biggest problem for Boston was their rebounding. We knew coming into the season that they’d have a tough time coming up with defensive rebounds, especially against bigger teams. Back in November, Mazzulla laid out what the Celtics needed to be, and do, to overcome this problem. 

“We're never going to be top five, but we have to be better,” he said. “There's ones that we have to get, and then there's we have to be able to compensate in other areas to be better at that, whether it's our shot making, whether it's our turnovers, whether it's our offensive rebounds, whether it's us not turning over.”

So the Celtics didn’t have to be great at defensive rebounding, but they just couldn't be horrible at it. To make up for it, they had to win the shot margins by crashing the glass, protecting the ball, and forcing the other team to make costly mistakes. 

The win over Milwaukee was a great example of how all of that came together. 

Let’s start with the Celtics simply not being horrible on the defensive glass, which they were to start the season. Here’s a look at their month-to-month progression in defensive rebounding percentage (league rank in parentheses). 

OCT: 64.7% (28) NOV: 67% (26) DEC: 68.3% (18) JAN: 71.7% (9) 

Overall, the Celtics are still 23rd at 68.7%, but the trend is clear and the overall point has been made. The Celtics just needed to be okay at it, and that's where they’ve landed. 

The Celtics grabbed 70.9% of the defensive rebounds against Milwaukee. Doc Rivers teams don’t really crash the boards, so that helped in this endeavor, but Milwaukee still had 12 offensive rebounds and 13 second chance points. 

But Boston won that battle, grabbing 17 of their own and scoring 16 second chance points. They ended up winning the shot margin by 10, mostly because of their offensive rebounding, which inherently gave them at least an 8-10 point cushion based on their shooting percentage. Basically, if Milwaukee and Boston both shot the exact same percentage, the Celtics would probably have won by double-digits anyway because of their shot margin. 

The other factor in extending that margin is the turnovers. Boston protected the ball well, turning it over just 10 times for eight Milwaukee points. The Bucks didn’t turn it over a ton either, but theirs were much more damaging because the Celtics scored 15 off them. Live-ball turnovers are killers, and it’s how a team can only turn it over once more than their opponent but get nearly doubled up in points off turnovers.

Beating the Bucks isn’t exactly impressive anymore. They're 18-29, 2-9 in their last 11 games, and this was their fifth-straight loss. The Giannis Antetokounmpo saga is about to rip this team apart, it’s just a matter of how many pieces get sold off either at the trade deadline or this summer. 

But how the Celtics won is  proof of concept for Mazzulla. He knew his team would have to do certain things to get these wins, and this game shows why.