Picks 'n Pops: Coaching changes, hand gestures, and POINTS POINTS POINTS

Every week I gather some thoughts about the Celtics, the NBA, and beyond and dump them here. Because I was also denied the Atlanta Falcons head coaching job.

- There are two lessons for us to learn from the situation in Milwaukee. 

1: This is what bad coaching actually looks like. For all the complaints about Joe Mazzulla over the past year and a half, he not only took the job at the last minute last year, but he got a key player at the last minute this year, and the Celtics have kept it together. 

Adrian Griffin got Damian Lillard at the last minute and it feels like it threw everything off. He tried to defend one way then scrapped it in favor of more of the old way, and then everyone got confused. 

2: Coaches are only as good as the players they get. 

Griffin was hired, in part, because he was supposed to be a creative defensive mind. The Bucks gave him bad defenders. Is he suddenly an idiot? 

He didn’t handle it well, but the front office did him no favors. 

- Giving Doc Rivers $40 million is absolute insanity. 

- Wes Unseld, Jr. was screwed in Washington. No coach can survive the Jordan Poole experience. 

- Congratulations to Jayson Tatum for his fifth straight All-Star appearance and fourth start. Jaylen Brown will certainly be joining him there. I’m not sure how the coaches will vote, but I’m sticking by my take that the only way Boston gets three there is via injury replacement. 

- Congratulations to Tatum, Brown, Derrick White, and Jrue Holiday for making the USA Basketball player pool for the Paris games this summer. The last time Holiday went to the Olympics, his team won a championship, so maybe that's the secret sauce for Boston. 

- I’m not great at creating nicknames, but I do not approve of Cookies & Cream as one for Brown and Kristaps Porzingis. 

- Mazzulla was asked about movies again, and this time he dropped A Bronx Tale’s “nobody cares” reference. At some point, I expect Mazzulla to go full Jigsaw on the media, lock us in a room, and force us all to decipher the hidden message behind all his favorite movie scenes to escape with our lives

- Players can’t get mad at awards voting when they do things like this:

There were starter votes for Trendon Watford and Steven Adams. So next time someone comes at the media for how they vote, players need to be reminded how they vote for things. 

- The Last Two Minute report for Charlotte/Minnesota this week showed TEN wrong calls, six going against Minnesota on a night Karl-Anthony Towns scored 62 and lost. I didn’t know it was possible to blow it worse than the Timberwolves did, but the refs actually topped them. 

- Joel Embiid scoring 70 is crazy, right Kevin Durant?

He’s right, though. The scoring in this league is insane. I have to think the league will want to rein it in a little, right? Teams are regularly scoring 130, 140, 150 right now. How about a LITTLE defense?

- I was totally fine with Jaylen Brown’s last-minute assist to earn the triple-double in Houston. The Rockets were still playing hard through the final seconds, so Boston was right to keep playing too. And I see nothing wrong with Brown’s teammates being aware of it and wanting to get it for him.

- My guess is someone in the NBA heard the phrase “Tristan Thompson is actually useful in Cleveland” on a podcast or something and said to himself “we should probably drug test him.” 

- Patrick Beverley is so desperate for attention that he’s sending someone into a postgame press conference to hunt for podcast material. Pathetic. 

- I have no idea who the Celtics MVP is right now

- The OG Anunoby trade is working out well for New York 

- The NHL says it’s considering Utah as a market, and there are only two acceptable outcomes to this. 

1. Move the St. Louis Blues to Utah so the least entertaining state in the country has both the Blues and Jazz.
2. Move the New Jersey Devils to Utah so we can see protests over the team name. 

- Hawaii wants to make the shaka, the extended thumb-and-pinky “hang loose” motion, as the state’s official gesture. If you want to see the official Massachusetts hand gesture, just go sit in Expressway traffic for five minutes. 

- I honestly can’t believe they're using the emo Jimmy Butler photo for everything 

Last year it was dreadlocks. This year it was emo. Next year it will be NBA representative-approved and monitored headshot. 

- Can Vista Print PLEASE make some new commercials without those ridiculous fake accent guys?

- Count me as all in for a Steph Curry vs Sabrina Ionescu shooting contest. 

- This week’s AI image: A visual approximation of Kristaps “The Unicorn” Porzingis recent play

You don't want a headbutt from this guy.

- Your current NBA Belt Champion, the Indiana Pacers

- Here’s my latest podcast, if you’re bored: