On Joe Mazzulla, Who Has the Boston Celtics Living Up to His Expectations, Not Yours

Joe Mazzulla always knew he could win at least 50 games with this version of the Boston Celtics. I didn’t believe him, but he was adamant about it.

The Celtics are now 38-20 with 24 games left to play. Their .655 winning percentage puts them at a 53-54 win pace, which would deliver on Mazzulla’s promise, and then some.

Mazzulla will ultimately go down as one of the game’s most unique head coaches. In a league full of copycats, Mazzulla truly is one of one. He does not adhere to preconceived notions. He doesn’t “play the game” with the media. He is intentional with every action and every word with his team, which he puts above all else.

Testing mettle

I was on the floor at the Auerbach Center when the Celtics coaches put a viral whippin’ on all of us in the media. It felt like playing basketball in a tornado, with a bunch of young, former Division I and former NBA players going full speed against a bunch of sports writers. From the outside, it looked like bullying. But Mazzulla was looking for information.

We, in the media, represent one of the biggest threats to his team. Mazzulla can’t control what we ask. He can’t control the relationships people build with his players. And he can’t get into anyone’s head to prevent reactions to the questions, comments, and opinions.

So he had to know who we are and what we are made of. He saw an opportunity to put us under stress and see how we react. Whenever Mazzulla wants to test someone, he puts that person in a stressful or awkward situation, and he makes a read based on that reaction.

Mazzulla loves making reads. His entire offense is predicated on them, and it truly is how he lives his life. There is no playbook for anything between waking up and going to sleep. Every day will present its own challenges, and we have to read them, and then react. He read the media after chewing us up and spitting us out. He reads his players after every practice and game.

What makes what Mazzulla does possible is his authenticity. Listen to any of his players in an interview when they're asked about Mazzulla, they’ll tell you he’s exactly what you see in the media. He’s not putting on some show for the cameras. He is unabashedly himself.

This is all where his coaching comes from.

From Joe, with love

“Joe’s one of the best people I've ever been around, one of the best, genuine, fierce… like, he's an ultimate competitor,” Jayson Tatum said in a recent podcast appearance. “But more than that, he cares about every single person in that locker room, on staff, in that organization.”

Some coaches seem like they're always coaching for their jobs. Mazzulla came into this gig knowing he’ll be fired someday, because everyone in this business is. So instead of worrying about it, he embraced his coaching mortality from the beginning and decided that if he’s going out, he’s going to do it on his terms, coaching how he believed he should coach.

He’s not a “I say, you do” kind of coach, at least not in the traditional sense. He and his staff provide the structure, but within that, the decisions are up to the players.

“It's not a memorization,” Mazzulla said earlier this season. “It's a muscle memory on awareness … I mean, there are plays that we have to memorize, but within the plays you have to know all the different variables that go into that. You may run the same play five times, they may guard it three different ways of those five times, so you have to run the same play differently to get what you want out of that.”

The league has gotten too sophisticated for simple set plays. There are plenty of them, but you can’t come down and just run mechanical sets and expect them to work every time. Teams run different coverages almost every other play in some games, so the Celtics have to be aware of the changes in real time, and adjust.

Read, and react

The Lakers threw a hybrid zone/man coverage at Boston for a while, and it took some time for Boston to figure it out. But once they processed it, they exploited it, and started to force JJ Redick into other coverages that his team couldn't quite execute as well. For the Celtics, the preparation for moments like this leads to the trust in one another that they’ll figure things out in time to give themselves a chance to win.

“Me and Joe call it Celtics University,” Jaylen Brown said back in December. “It's like you're in class and you got to pay attention. … It's like being in school and we're going through breaking down the footage and trying to really expand our knowledge for the game.”

Reading the game works both ways. Mazzulla loves to talk about 15-20 plays, maybe 30 after the loss to Denver, that changed a particular game. The theory is that about 70-80% of the game can go the exact same way in a win or a loss, but it’s that other 20-30% that affects the outcome. The team that can win that portion of the game will come away with the win. That's what he’s working to get his players to do.

“[We have to] be the smarter playing team,” Brown said. “We've been saying it from the beginning. And sometimes it doesn't look like it, but we look at how to approach each and every game from a strategy, tactic standpoint. And I feel like we, from the point of the start of the season till where we're at now, our basketball IQ has increased, our poise has increased, our understanding of the game has increased. And that's really what it's about. Continue to grow and get better. And I feel like I've watched these guys become better basketball players in a matter of three months.”

This is part of how Neemias Queta has grown from unplayable for portions of last season to a quality starting center. Or how Baylor Scheierman has become a solid defender and plus rebounder. It takes hard work and dedication from the players and their player development coaches, but it all falls under this guiding principle.

Be smarter than the other guys

This Celtics team came into the season leaning on its offense. Defense and rebounding were their weakness, but they just went 8-2 in their last 10 games with the league’s 15th-ranked offense and top-ranked defense over that stretch. Every time the Celtics are faced with something that feels like it might sink them, they figure out a work-around.

All the while, we on the outside come off like Homer Simpson trying to eat potato chips around greyhound puppies. We reach into our bag of tropes and expect to munch on an easy story, only to have some Celtic swoop in and steal it from us.

I’ll go back to July, when even Brad Stevens couldn't muster his usual positive spin about the frontcourt he’d assembled.

“That group will not be the group that people will single out based on paper, on what they've done with their careers thus far, as our strongest position,” he said. “But it's up to them to prove it otherwise.”

The Celtics have been proving things otherwise all season long, partly because these are the types of people they are. The Celtics have a roster full of proud competitors who love proving things to other people.

But this is still a business, and all of these guys proving things inherently put them in competition with one another. All these young wings, all these bigs, they all want the same thing: consistent minutes to prove they can be a big part of a winner, and to get the contracts that go along with that.

Fans can say guys need to do what’s best for the team, but this is their livelihood. This is how they make money, and they have a very short amount of time to make as much as they can. Putting a roster of a bunch of “prove it” guys together can be dangerous.

Not for Mazzulla and his staff, though. This is perhaps their greatest accomplishment.

They have not only gotten through to everyone on the roster, teaching them the X’s and O’s and how to make all the reads. They have wrangled everyone into one cohesive unit that, above all else, plays for each other every night. It might not go perfectly, and some nights it might go poorly, but they are always playing for each other.

A world-class culture is not exclusive to where Tequesta once lived. The Celtics have built a top-to-bottom success story of their own, and Mazzulla is the driver of it all.

Yes, he’s a little off-kilter. He lives to create awkward moments just to see how people will handle them. He’ll surprise his team with a war soundtrack during a drill, or by pulling out spikeball games. He takes the term “method to his madness” to an extreme, but always with a purpose.

He’s a leading candidate for Coach of the Year, but there's little he cares about less than winning it. If he does, he will reject any credit for it and give it all to his staff and team for allowing him to do what he does. He’s well aware of the Sword of Damocles that hangs over every coach’s head, but he embraces every bit of what that means, and he gets his team to do the same.

There's no award that can give him any more satisfaction than that.