For Joe Mazzulla, 82 games might as well have been broken up into four semesters, with each giving him a chance to learn something new. He was not only a first-year head coach, he had only been in the league three seasons before taking over.
Now, with his first full regular season at the helm behind him, he can take a breath and reflect.
“You just don’t know what you don’t know. I think you have to go through certain stuff in order to be aware of it,” Mazzulla said. “There’s just some stuff that you can’t simulate. And so, I think my focus was on, what’s the most important thing at this time? And then along the way, you see some of the stuff you need to get better at. You handle each situation different. And so, I think I’ve just tried to be open-minded and flexible throughout the entire year, understanding that it’s not going to go well all the time.”
He’s right, it didn’t always go well. It started well, but things faded a little in December. They got back to winning, figuring out how to do it without hitting a ton of 3-pointers, but they hit another slide after the All-Star break. But the Celtics finished the season pretty strongly, winning five of six games, giving Mazzulla 57 wins, the second-most ever for a rookie Celtics head coach.
“I've talked to a lot of people over the year to help me get prepared for this moment from an experience, people in different sports,” Mazzulla said. “I still think the simple things are the most important. And we can sit up here and talk about sub patterns and matchups and things that have an effect on the game, but at the end of the day, transition defense, turnovers, out-shooting your opponents, free throw rebounds, end of game, end of quarter situations … the main things are the main things; how we manage the game, how we win the details of the game.”
The Celtics finish the season as the league’s second-best offense and defense. No other team is in the top five in both categories, and only Cleveland (first in defense, eighth in offense) is in the top 10. That generally bodes well for a run to the Finals.
“Joe is a strength. He’s done a really good job,” Brad Stevens said before the game against Atlanta. “I understand because he’s new that the easiest thing to do is nitpick him, but he’s done a really good job. If he needs me, I’m here, but I trust him and I trust the staff, and they’ve all done a good job. I think our players would all second that.”
Players will follow a coach who can connect with them and have their backs. If they believe in him, they’ll buy into what he’s telling them. The Celtics have that with Mazzulla.
“He's done a great job of being there for players in a sense of always challenging them to be as good as they can be,” Grant Williams told Boston Sports Journal. “He's improved a ton, especially throughout the season, on the x's and o's and just quick plays. He's done a great job of that. I think he's been one of the best coaches in the league at that. And then he's just continuing to keep a headstrong approach about how he sees things, and that's what you need in the head coach.”
Mazzulla joked that the biggest lesson he’s learned over the course of the season is to call timeouts, but the way he’s seeing the game has gotten better over the course of the season.
“He's quicker to stop a run, he's quicker to do things,” Stevens said. “He may stop a game so he can make a sub. He may let a game go so they can't make a sub. There's a lot of decisions to be made in that moment and you kind of feel out how your team best needs you and that takes time. That takes time for a person that's done it for 30 years and that takes time for a person that's never done it before, and he's done a good job.”
One of the noticeable elements of the Celtics' regular-season finale between their and Atlanta’s JV squads is how animated Mazzulla was coaching the game. Half his team took the day off, but Mazzulla didn’t. And he probably won’t take any until whenever the season forces him to.
There is a fear that Mazzulla is the weakest link on an otherwise strong Celtics squad. This postseason will be a tough final exam for a coach looking to do what only five other rookie head coaches have done in the modern NBA. They’ll find out on Tuesday night who their first-round opponent will be, and then they will start what they hope is a championship run on Saturday or Sunday. For now, Mazzulla can stop to smell a rose or two before embarking on a run that could help him collect many more in June.
“Really just a chance to take a deep breath and just have the gratitude and perspective for the position that I'm in and a position that we're in as a team,” he said. “I think it’s really important to have that. It's easy to lose sight of that, especially the way we started out. So I think I've done that over the last couple of days. And I think just today is another example of that; of having the gratitude and the perspective and I think that'll help us prepare and will help us have the proper mindset for the playoffs.”
