Joe Mazzulla is a basketball coach. His job is to get a group of men to work with each other and put a ball into a 10-foot-high cylinder more often than another group of men wearing different colored clothing.
To get there at this level takes a lot of work and a lot of trust. It also involves a bit of psychology.
"I think Joe is very smart and he is very also like mindset-driven,” Kristaps Porzingis said after the Celtics win over Indiana. “He knows how important the mindset and the mentality is. That's just who he is also. Does jiu jitsu, plays chess - he's always trying to evolve always as a coach, as a person. He's translated that to us. I think he's a young coach, but I think he's very smart."
As much as Mazzulla hopes to draw up X’s and O’s that win games, he’s trying to build a mental profile in his players to approach each game equally and to understand that the intangible stuff is just as important as knowing when and how to set a pick or make a pass.
Which is why he gets genuinely excited to dive into games where the team doesn’t play well. The last thing he wants is for his team to feel like they have the world figured out right now.
After struggling to beat the New Orleans Pelicans, he said he hopes “it happens 10, 12 more times so we can get rid of the entitlement that we're always supposed to be winning. So I hope we have to blow leads. I hope all that happens. I really do.”
Jrue Holiday confirmed that Mazzulla does, in fact, enjoy adversity.
“It’s a learning experience,” Holiday said. “We gotta be able to be battle-tested. We’ve gotta be able to fight through everything, fight through expectations, fight through being up 20 and then somebody having a great third quarter and then finishing games. If it feels easy the whole time, then what’s the fun in that? No, I don’t like blowing leads like that, but I think being able to battle back and win those is huge for us.”
Mazzulla doesn’t want Boston to play perfectly. He wants his team to think perfectly. After a game, he wants to sit down in front of me and my cohorts and explain that his team prepared well, made every right read, took every right shot, and made every right pass. From there, a win or a loss will take care of itself.
Does Mazzulla really want to blow 20-point leads? No. What he prefers is that his Celtics double that lead by doing all the little things and focusing on proper execution.
But the reality is that those things don’t happen. A perfect basketball game really doesn’t exist. Getting 48 perfect minutes out of an NBA team is damn near impossible because the human brain won’t allow for it to happen. There will always be ebbs and flows, especially at this time of year.
“We know teams are going to go through lulls, or even mentally, physically, you can go through kind of like a stalemate,” Holiday said. “But mentally, you have to prepare to come in every game and perform and perform the way you’re supposed to. So, he preaches a lot on mentality and being able to be strong mentally because obviously down the road, when things get tough, you can always rely on that.”
There is no real formula for winning a basketball game because human beings are involved, and we tend to make things difficult on ourselves because of our big brains. Egos and emotions are involved. External factors creep in and pull some guys in a different direction. So it makes no sense to Mazzulla to simply provide a script to follow because the whole world is ad-libbing every day.
“I think there’s never one way to win a game,” Mazzulla said. “Obviously, the non-negotiables are there: your effort, defense, execution and that stuff. But just being open-minded to you never know how a game’s going to go. You can win it in a different way.
“And then I think it’s important the relationship with both kind of winning and losing. I’ve said it a couple of times: Winning can be unhealthy because you start to think that you don’t have to reinvent yourself or you just get too comfortable. Obviously too much losing is unhealthy as well. So just the balance of that relationship, trying not to hang onto wins or hang onto losses and just take the lesson. Like, what did we learn from this and how do we have to get better? I think that’s important.”
The Celtics found a way to beat the Pacers after the Pacers nearly found a way to beat the Celtics. Jaylen Brown admitted after the game that Celtics teams of the past would have found ways to lose games like this, and their ability to keep their heads in the right place … or at least get them back there fairly quickly … has helped them put this 37-11 record together.
“There’s coaching and then there's intangible stuff like mentality and I think that together, our team has tried to establish a standard and that standard embodies a mentality,” Brown said. “Defensively, we gotta be a certain effort level every night. Offensively, share the ball. Rebounding, making sure you block out. Making sure you get your guy off the glass. Those are coaching stuff but it’s also like mentality stuff that you gotta come in day in and day out and kind of put that energy level towards it, and I think they go hand in hand at times.”
It rarely works for 48 minutes because other humans have a say in the results, but that's also how Mazzulla wants it. He wants it to be difficult because it’s always going to be difficult. We can disagree on certain aspects of his coaching ability, but we can’t say he’s ignorant of the realities of the game. The easy wins are unusual. The difficult wins are the norm.
And the more they figure out how to mentally handle the ups and downs of a game that is almost always going to show themselves, the better prepared they’ll be for the most important stretch of 16 wins they’ll ever face.
“If we want to be that caliber of team, we need to have that kind of mindset and that kind of trust,” Porzingis said. “And also, not take things personally. If you get taken out of a game or something's not going your way or whatever, we're just here to win and do what's best for the team. And if we all keep that mindset, it'll be a special year."