Joe Mazzulla's secret to Boston Celtics chemistry, courtesy of Pep Guardiola

We’re halfway through the regular season and the Boston Celtics are the Eastern Conference’s second seed. It’s still a bit of a surprise to see a Celtics teams that was torn down be doing so well, but what might be just as surprising is seeing who isn’t.

The New York Knicks have lost four in a row, including a blowout loss to the Dallas Mavericks at home that saw the team booed off the floor. They've lost nine of their last 11 games, and now a lot of the chatter around the team involves Karl-Anthony Towns’ struggles and fit with the rest of the roster.

After this latest loss, Jalen Brunson reportedly called a players-only meeting and Josh Hart talked about playing embarrassing basketball and the need for some soul-searching.

This reminds me of OKC Thunder GM Sam Presti’s quote from a few years ago, talking about the challenges teams face.

“The sky falls on every NBA team at least two times a year,” he said. “You may play horrible for weeks, it may be a month. … You have to keep pounding through this and working through it. I think if you have the right principles, right mentality, and right temperament you can work through that and become a better player and a better team.”

An 82 game season is a grind. Front offices are constructing teams based on perceived basketball fit, available money to spend, and sometimes the whims of the moment when a surprising trade becomes available. The “get along” part is something the players and coaches have to figure out, and that's not always easy to do.

“The NBA season tests everything,” Joe Mazzulla said in an appearance on the team’s official podcast, View From The Rafters, “But it tests just your ability to stick together all the time.”

Despite their rise to the second seed, the Celtics are going through their own struggles at the moment. They're 3-4 over their last seven games, all of them tight, clutch losses. But the team is still together and working through their issues.

After their loss to the Detroit Pistons, the Celtics locker room wasn’t sullen or sulking. They were watching Indiana win the National Championship, debating whether the Hoosiers should have gone for it on fourth down instead of kicking the field goal. There was no sniping at one another. Everyone in there could have been teleported to a bar with a couple of pitchers of beer and they would have fit right in. They’d just spent more than a week on the road and went through a tough loss, but they were able to compartmentalize it, and move forward together.

“I think the season tests that more than the basketball stuff,” Mazzulla said. “You’re away from your families. Who's playing well, who's not playing well. We’re talking about accepting roles and the changes over the course of a team, who's starting, who's not starting, who's playing more. There's so many things that test your competitive joy and your togetherness on a daily basis that fighting for that over the course of 82 is (important).”

Mazzulla called it perhaps the most important lesson he’s learned over his short coaching career. At first, he thought it was most critical to have a buttoned-up game plan for everyone to follow. While that is still, obviously, important, it’s not the only thing that feeds his team’s success.

“You can't neglect that competitive joy part in and what goes into that,” he said, crediting legendary soccer manager Pep Guardiola for the lesson. “He just talked about it the other day, where they use the Club World Cup as, like whether they won or not, it was almost like an ability for them to just reconnect. And so I think that stuff is more important than a game plan. You still have to do that, but you got to really focus on that throughout a season.”

One of the ways the Celtics have done that is to have players make presentations to the team about something personal. Jordan Walsh went into detail about his love of anime. Josh Minott made a presentation about his tattoos.

“It takes five minutes you learn something about a teammate, and it just kind of builds a different type of connection,” Mazzulla said. “They take it serious. We're almost through the whole team, but it's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot. I'm sure they have, too.”

The Celtics have overachieved for a lot of different reasons. Jaylen Brown is having an All-NBA season, the Celtics have gotten great production out of a number of role players, and they’ve quickly learned new concepts and applied them faster than expected. The on-court stuff has gone better than most people expected, and a big part of that is the team’s focus on the off-court relationships. January is another test for the Celtics, but as other teams around them look to be falling apart at the seams, the Celtics seem to understand the little things necessary to power through the tough times.