Joe Mazzulla Has a Warning as Celtics Continue Their Quest to Play Faster

There's no truth to the rumor that Christopher Nolan’s first idea for a remake of The Odyssey was following members of the Boston Celtics on an epic quest to play faster.

It turns out Matt Damon fighting a cyclops and sea monsters for 10 years was a little more believable.

The Celtics have been driving in the right lane with their blinker on for a long time. They were last in pace last season and next to last the season before. You have to go back to the 2019-20 season for the last time they weren’t in the bottom third.

Still, they’ve come into every season as hopeful as ever that things would be different.

“I can already tell you we’re going to be the fastest team in the league,” Josh Minott said almost exactly one year ago after the team’s first official practice.

On that same day, Luka Garza said, “You could tell right since I got here that that’s the focus this year. What we want to do is get up and down and push the pace and get into actions early and be able to move the ball around and score and kind of use all sides of the floor while doing that.”

They then went and put up their worst pace number since 2014.

“I figure anything that we could do would be a little bit better,” Joe Mazzulla told reporters at the team’s first official practice this season. “It's a topic that comes up every single year, and what people don't talk about is the other side of that. If you do lean into that more, it's at the expense of something else. So I think everything that we do is just a balance.”

It’s been noted many times that a high pace number doesn’t equal success. The teams that play fastest generally have to because they don’t have the talent to execute in the half court. Running and gunning is typically, but not always, the way lesser teams find ways to score. The Celtics, despite some obvious playoff flameouts, have had a lot of success while playing the slowest brand of basketball in the league.

A lot of that success is because their pace, while slow, is still better than their opponents. Boston still took three-and-a-half more shots per game than their opponents last season. Kids today call it possession-maxxing, which has been at the heart of Mazzulla’s approach in Boston.

So part of the balance Mazzulla is talking about is weighing whether the Celtics getting up-and-down more gives the other team more possessions as well. The more they have the ball, the more chances they have to score, and the more shot-variance can come into play. If the Celtics take three more shots but their opponents also take three, are those three going to be equal?

One fear Mazzulla has is missed layups leading to easy opponent points, and that becomes an issue with increased pace. If Boston’s three more shots are layup attempts, what happens if two of those are contested and become transition three-pointers for the other team? Sure, Boston would get three shots at the rim, but they could cost themselves points while they're at it. So it’s not always cut-and-dry.

“That's where it's like learning your team. What balance are we willing to give up on one thing to be better at something else,” Mazzulla said. “It's never just ‘get better at this.’ It's always ‘if you get better at this, you're going to get a little bit worse at this,’ and you're going to lose the rope on those things … each team is a little bit different.”

There's no doubt that the Celtics should play a little faster, and the minutes without Jayson Tatum on the floor might be where it happens.

It goes back to the necessity of pushing the pace. If Tatum isn’t on the floor to control the offense, then getting out and running might be part of the solution. But pace isn’t always about running, either. It’s about tempo and getting into the offense quicker. It’s about starting the play at :18 on the shot clock versus :12, just to make the defense work harder and maybe force a mistake or two.

“Every one of us has to take a jump, get a little bit better,” Payton Pritchard said. “I think we're going to play with more movement. Hopefully, we play a little bit faster … It's partly on some of us, partly on me to get the ball out, push the pace.”

They’ve been chasing this goal for a long time. Maybe this is the year the odyssey finally comes to an end.

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