When Joe Mazzulla sits down to talk with reporters, his eyes move quickly from left to right. You imagine that it identifies where all the exits are. Like Al Capone, he never sits with his back to the entrance. It regurgitates games like Alexa at 2x speed. When fans created AI-generated quotes of him, they were indistinguishable from the actual things he said. He (famously) used to watch The city several times a week. He stole Fenway Park in his mind. He is inspired by football coaches. He loves blown slopes and rainy days. He thinks being booed is “good for you.”
To demonstrate how the Boston Celtics should attack their opponents, he merged videos of orcas, which hunt larger prey by swimming in packs and taking turns drowning them, into movie sessions. This all seems a little strange, a little fanciful, until you consider how collective the Celtics’ playoff dominance has been and how Luka Doncic, the white whale of the Western Conference, is now on his last legs. of breath.
Last season, Mazzulla was hastily named the Celtics’ interim head coach just days before training camp, following Ime Udoka’s suspension. His quirks became a source of intrigue, humor, and, when his methods didn’t work, mockery. But even after losing to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals, he doubled down, telling JJ Redick early this season that the fault lay not so much in his philosophy as in his execution. “I didn’t teach it well,” he said. “I didn’t put my players in the best possible position to succeed. Now I have to double down on my teaching.
Celtics backup center Luke Kornet, who often met Mazzulla while attending Mass on road trips, attributes his coach’s commitment to his vision to his faith. “When you know who it is, you are truly responsible and what your heart tells you about the best thing to do,” says Kornet, “to do anything other than that would be lying and deceptive. He is very convinced of that.
That’s how Mazzulla, 35, the NBA’s youngest and most idiosyncratic coach, has one of the oldest and most storied franchises in history, with a 3-0 lead, one victory away from its first title in 16 years.
It’s also, to hear him tell it, the most vulnerable they’ve ever been. “If you’ve ever gotten into a fight with someone and you think you’re about to beat them up, you usually get a punch,” he says. “The more you think you’re going to beat them, the closer you are to losing.”
If Mazzulla is an artist, cinema is his canvas and iMovie is his paintbrush. Early in the playoffs, a Celtics film session began with a clip of a UFC fighter getting “kicked in the nuts,” complaining to the referee and getting choked out in the next round. It was a reminder, for a team that made it through the regular season, to never lose focus. The closer you are to victory, he says, the closer you are to relaxing, to looking ahead, to being distracted by forces beyond your control. Arrogance sets in. The desperate adversary, humiliated by defeat, heaves a last sigh.
After the Celtics won Game 3, that philosophy, repeated by a reporter, prompted Jayson Tatum to nod emphatically and recall his own experience last year, when he nearly came back from down 0-3 against Miami last season. For a team prone to blowing leads, underplaying competition and riding the highs and lows of Mazzulla’s high-variance, 3-point style, the lesson probably resonated more.
After Boston’s loss to Miami last playoffs, Mazzulla’s no-timeout philosophy, inspired by his love for football, made him look like a deer in the headlights as his opponents mounted giant comebacks. He wanted the Celtics, despite the constant stops and substitutions that make basketball a more methodical game, to be able to solve problems on the fly like football players must. His adherence to the 3-point game, despite his feast-or-famine results, made him look like a stubborn idiot, not a creative genius.
It’s not something, Jared Weiss from Athleticism pointed out during the post-match press conference after Game 3, which he is now being questioned about. “I think we were asked this question a lot just because it was new,” Mazzulla said. “Any time you develop a new philosophy or style, it just takes time to understand and execute it. »
Mazzulla still wanted the Celtics to turn to improvisation, moving the ball back and forth and looking for advantages, recognizing why other teams were making runs and self-correcting. His ideas were not only born from his obsession with football, but also from the understanding that despite our discursive fixation on the key timeout and the big adjustment, once the ball is in the air, coaches have less control over the game. result as the mythology around the profession. would like you to believe it.
“I think it’s just his overall understanding of what’s best for our team and what’s most important, knowing his role and being humble about it, knowing that the things he has control over aren’t the most powerful thing in the world,” Kornet said. “What you have as a coach, a lot of times it looks like down time, and they can use it, but at the same time knowing that my job is to maybe prepare my guys so that we can withstand (runs) . »
The Celtics front office also doubled down on Mazzulla’s philosophy, trading its emotional leader Marcus Smart for Kristaps Porzingis, who could space the court with even more precision than Al Horford. They also traded for Jrue Holiday, a two-way transition terror who could play multiple positions — basketball’s answer to a midfielder if ever there was one — and a Mazzulla-ball fever dream.
Boston shot even more triples per game in the playoffs than last, but it also broke the offensive glass harder, turning some of those misses into second-chance points, and used the 3 to cut down on turnovers. Take this play from the second game of the final:
It was the kind of sequence that can infuriate fans and coaches: Tatum, against a big, avoids driving to the rim and settles for a pull-up 3 — a shot he hits for only 27, 9 percent of the time in the playoffs – and is out on bail. eliminated by his teammate. But in Mazzulla’s system, with a powerful guard like Holiday empowered to crash from the corner, it’s a safe play with upside — the equivalent of throwing the ball down the court, hoping that an offensive player take control of it and save time to define your position. defense if possession changes. “We were in offensive rebound position,” Mazzulla explains, “the court was balanced, we had the game we wanted, and that allowed us to do both: offensive rebound and putback in transition.”
Here Mazzulla thinks not only about what happened but also about what did not happen. A layup could have left the Celtics defense vulnerable in transition or, worse, ended in a live ball turnover. Most teams that crash the glass give up a lot of fast break points, or vice versa. This season, Boston was one of four teams in the top 10 in offensive rebounding rate and fast break points defended.
There’s some mental jujitsu here, too: in public, Mazzulla defends his best player, while privately tinkering with a system that turns Tatum’s flaws into strengths — or at least minimizes their negative impact.
On one level, the Celtics have struggled through an unhealthy Eastern Conference that was not designed to emphasize Mazzulla’s theories. On the other hand, much of what could have gone wrong for the Celtics did: Porzingis played in all six games. Boston’s shooters cooled off in Game 2 against the Mavericks. Tatum shot less than 30 percent from the arc throughout the playoffs. It seemed, midway through Game 2 on Sunday, that Doncic had figured out how to beat Boston’s pick-and-roll coverage. In Game 3, the Celtics nearly blew a 21-point lead in the fourth quarter. Mazzulla, according to Derrick White, probably liked it. “He’s sick.”
None of the Celtics incidents or shots mattered. They are one win away from the title, behind a self-contained, self-correcting system that has strengthened them despite their flaws and allowed them to trust the numbers. A little Joe Math for you: In the first three games of the series, the Celtics have taken 127 3s. Dallas has only taken 78. They haven’t been perfect, but they haven’t either been fragile, capable of resisting the uncertainty that their style requires.
Perhaps a more successful Mavericks team, or a healthier Eastern Conference, could have put Mazzulla’s decision-making under the microscope and tested him to make adjustments he’s not comfortable with. The strength of the competition they faced will fuel a tension that will follow them even as the Celtics raise their 18th banner: Did they win because they were untested? Or did it feel like they weren’t tested because they were so prepared?
“I think everyone tries to look at the game the same way, so I think the more you look at it from a different perspective, it allows you to bond and it really allows you to focus on winning games and lost.” Mazzulla said. “I think everyone notices the easy things. Can you struggle to notice the things others don’t? Because that’s where winning and losing are, in that space.