Joe Mazzulla is doing things his way, which sometimes means doing things … unconventionally.
“He just does things a little differently,” Derrick White said of his head coach. “He likes the uncomfortable probably a little bit more than other people like the uncomfortable. But I mean, that's just the cool thing about him. Like, that's just the way he's wired.”
Oh, you mean like when Mazzulla said after the loss to the Lakers without LeBron James or Anthony Davis, “it’s great. It’s good. … stretches of bad basketball happen, and we can’t sit here and act like we’re too entitled for it to happen to us. … To think we’re not going to go through difficult times during an 82-game NBA season is not the right way to look at it. So am I pissed about losing? Yes. But am I ecstatic about the opportunity for us to grow as a team? I’m even happier about that.”
That's uncomfortable alright.
Mazzulla won his 100th career game on Wednesday night, becoming the fifth-fastest in NBA history to reach that milestone. That could be very meaningful (Steve Kerr did it, and he’s won four titles) or somewhat meaningful (Tom Thibodeau did it, and he has zero titles but 510 wins. Avery Johnson also did it and has 440 wins and an NBA Finals loss, and he’s out of the NBA). We really don’t know what it means yet.
But while we can’t predict the long-term future, we can safely assume that getting to 200 wins will probably be pretty easy for Mazzulla as well, considering the team he has. A prerequisite for winning a bunch of games in a short amount of time is having a lot of good players.
“I told the guys, I think it’s something to be proud of, something to be grateful for, and I think it’s a testament to the people you have around you,” Mazzulla said. “It really starts with the players, and I always tell them I can't be who I am if they don't let me, and I appreciate that. That's a gift in coaching, you can always be in a situation where you don't have empowerment, or you don't have guys that allow you to be yourself. It's an important gift that the players give me, and they give it to each other.”
NBA coaching is different than coaching at other levels. Yes, there's plenty of the typical coach/player dynamic where the coach tells guys to do something and they have to follow instructions. The coach puts the plan together and the guys have to execute it.
But this is still very different than any coaching you might be used to seeing. It’s definitely nothing close to college, where coaches can scream and yell and players have to sit and take it. NBA coaching is much more of a partnership during games because players are so freakin’ talented that they're capable of doing things no coach would ever intentionally demand.
Jayson Tatum is going to do Jayson Tatum things, whether the coach draws it up that way or not.
But Joe Mazzulla is going to do Joe Mazzulla things, too. Maybe that's not something people are used to, and maybe it’s not something the players are used to, either. But there is a method to Mazzulla’s madness, and it’s led him to a 43-12 record and a 64-win pace this season.
It’s working.
“People don’t appreciate who he is and how he coaches because he’s very young, you can always blame it on him and stuff like that,” Kristaps Porzingis said. “But he’s a very underrated coach. Very underrated and different. And yeah, think people don’t see who he really is and how he coaches and it’s easy to not give him the credit because of the talent we have, no? But he deserves a lot of credit.”
Mazzulla loves challenging conventional thought, even if it’s just to see what answers people give when he prods. And as much as he might get under people’s skin when he does that, he’s willing to take the same from others. He loves to win anything, arguments included, but he also isn’t afraid to lose at something if it gives him a different perspective.
That's when it gets philosophical with Mazzulla, because if you’re getting something good out of losing, are you really losing at all?
Mazzulla relishes the negative because of what it exposes. He loves when things get tough because that's when you really know how good things are.
Any house can look good on a sunny day, but what happens when it rains? Are there leaks? Is there flooding? What happens when the wind blows? Is there a draft? Will you waste money heating your house?
The only way to know how much a team can stand up to is to have it stand up to something. And when there are chances to challenge the team as a whole or individual players, Mazzulla is willing to put his players into uncomfortable spots to get the answers.
And that also applies to himself.
Mazzulla knows what people think about him, and he isn’t avoiding it, either.
“I’ve grown to absolutely endear it and love it. And I think it’s beautiful,” he said. “It comes with the job, it’s the expectation. It doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. You just can’t take yourself too serious. You should laugh at yourself. You should also laugh at other people. You should love yourself and love other people. And you should just have fun while you’re doing it.
“The responsibility is handling those expectations. You just have to embrace it. I don’t believe in ignoring the noise. I just don’t believe in that because you’re not going to ignore something negative but then wish to get praise. You know what I mean? Everybody lives in this world of, like, I’ll ignore the noise but if someone says something good about you, you should listen to that. You should hear both of it and you should decipher what’s true and then you just kind of move on from there.”
You’ll notice none of what I’ve said about this 100-win coach has anything to do with X’s and O’s. That's because a million people know those and can’t coach at this level. I can go onto Twitter and find five guys giving brilliant technical breakdowns far more intricate and detailed than anything I can ever do.
They're not in the league. Some used to be and want back in. Others wish they were and will never sniff a chance.
Mazzulla and his staff are technically brilliant basketball minds because you can’t be at this level and win at this rate without having that kind of knowledge. I’ve talked to some of them about technical basketball stuff and it feels like they break into another language sometimes. They process things at a speed I’ll never fully grasp, recalling plays and options in a blink when I have to watch a play five times to pick up the same things.
That's not what makes great NBA coaching.
Adrian Griffin is brilliant, too, but he flopped right away because he couldn't connect. Phil Jackson was called the Zen Master because of his ability to get big egos to work together. Tex Winter handled the X’s and O’s.
Mazzulla’s biggest accomplishment will be getting his team to embrace his philosophy of accepting the moment, living in it, and doing what is necessary to win at that time.
“Whenever we're not, maybe like just running through the other team, we're almost like … our energy is a little bit down,” Porzingis said, recalling the unexpectedly tight game against Washington where Mazzulla tried to break the tension with a joke in the huddle. “I think at that moment it made sense for us to be like, oh this, this is basketball, we're not gonna be perfect every game, we're not gonna be up all the time and so it made sense to just ease up the mood and just kind of go out there, have fun, play hard. … we always have to try to put things in perspective where, we're not supposed to be up all the time and just win easy. There's gonna be tough games and tough games against teams that are not our equals record-wise or anything like that. So it’s on us to come every game and prove it like we did tonight.”
Over the course of 26 hours, the Celtics played two very different games against the same team. Each game required something different to win. Thursday in Chicago will be a different story. And regardless of what you or I think of how it should go, the Celtics need to figure out how to win depending on how the game actually goes. Narratives are the enemy.
“I am annoyed by the narrative, because I think you can either talk yourself into something or you can talk yourself out of something,” he said. “So you’ve got to be very careful about the words you use to yourself and around you. So I think it's important – our guys have done a good job of controlling the words we speak to each other about what's important.”
If Mazzulla can keep everyone’s minds in the right place, the rest will fall in line quite nicely. If the Celtics can forget about what “should” happen and just focus on how to best hand what is actually happening, then they’ll be ready for whatever comes their way. Sometimes they’ll win by 50, and other times they’ll win by five. But as long as they're winning and enjoying the process of it all as a team, then everyone will be happen in the end.
“It's been great just building that relationship with him on the court and off the court,” Derrick White said. “Great guy, great coach, and I just love playing for him.”