Jrue Holiday is on his fourth team in his 15th NBA season, so he has seen a lot. He’s playing for his sixth head coach, and to say Joe Mazzulla is different might be an understatement.
“I feel like some coaches sometimes it can be methodical or it can be boring,” Holiday said after the team’s Sunday practice. “But Joe definitely brings a spark … some weird energy. I think it keeps us engaged at this point.”
Holiday has used a particular word … “crazy” … to describe Mazzulla and his tactics. So the natural question is why does that word come up so often when he talks about his coach?
“Because he’s crazy. Anybody who knows Joe knows he’s crazy,” Holiday said. “And that’s pretty much it. But I think it’s, I don’t know, maybe controlled madness. It’s definitely his way of preparing us and I feel like preparing himself and I think it’s been working.”
It has been working. Mazzulla’s Celtics still haven't lost more than two games in a row on their way to 64 regular season wins and little more than a brisk walk into the Eastern Conference Finals. Their dominance so far has given them stretches of six, five, and five days off before taking on a playoff opponent.
They’ve had a lot of time to prepare, get healthy, and hammer home some of the Xs and Os necessary for the next round. They’ve also had a lot of time to think.
“You gotta stay engaged and locked in mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physically, because, there’s a fight coming up,” Mazzulla said. “It's gonna be a long one and we're just coming out of the fight, so it's like that space in between bouts, right? Like how do you recover, but at the same time, how do you not let your guard down? How do you stay in the fight? How do you stay ready, stay engaged into the things that are important that go into winning, that go into being prepared?”
One way Mazzulla has taken advantage of the downtime is to explore how other teams get through their series.
“So many times I think when you're, especially in the NBA, you just get so caught up in, like a horse with blinders, worried about your own team and your own game that you don't realize that, like hey, there's a lot of stuff going on around the league that we can learn from,” Mazzulla said. “And the guys have been really coachable and they've learned and that allows us to pull from those situations.”
Mazzulla is always looking for a teachable moment. He gets excited about losses, reveling in the ability to break down the breakdowns. The “why” is a critical part of Mazzulla’s approach, but it goes beyond just finding the missed rotation or wrong screening angle. Mazzulla wants to dig down deeper and figure out why a player didn’t see what he was supposed to see.
“I've definitely learned a lot from him,” Payton Pritchard said. “Joe really studies the game, studies the mental side of things a lot, so I think that's our biggest growth this year is how do we prepare mentally for the battle ahead and staying in the moment and not losing ourselves. So that's what I’ve learned most from him, and I think we've done a really good job with that.”
Joe 2.0 has been a significant upgrade compared to last season. He handled being thrown into the job at the last minute well enough, but he never had a chance to build anything meaningful with the players. He started out as part of a plane’s flight crew and was thrown into the cockpit mid-flight.
“That's the real answer to what everybody asked all year about, like, oh, what's the difference between this year and last year,” Mazzulla said. “The difference is we've had time and we've had experiences to pull from and we've had time to talk about those. … We've had time to talk about how we want to handle situations, we've had time to talk about how we've handled past situations … We've had time to build a relationship together, to have open honest communication about how we want to go about doing things, and how we should handle different situations and experiences.”
It has also made him more comfortable in his own skin. He has always been a different bird, from suggesting he and his wife live in a mobile home on campus at Division II Fairmont State to suggesting getting choked out every once in a while is a good thing to experience. Mazzulla has been challenging conventional wisdom for years, and that hasn’t changed as head coach of the Celtics. And that brings him to some pretty interesting places during practices.
“You just go with it. You go with the craziness,” Holiday said. “But he honestly makes you lock in because it’s so different, you definitely have to pay attention to the things that he says. Sometimes he might talk kind of fast and he might talk through something and you kind of be like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, slow down.’ But I think really locking in like that helps me because it really makes me go back and be like, ‘All right, what did he say? This is what we want to do.’ Kind of like, I don’t know, a school session or something like that to be able to really study what we want to do and really just be the best at it.”
One of Mazzulla’s pet phrases is about humility and being willing to do uncomfortable things when it matters most. He hates expectations because those are the enemy of the humility he’s looking for. On a team like his with a lot of star power and players capable of a lot of things, he wants them to only focus on what’s necessary.
“Everybody wants to win until it’s really time to win,” he said after the Game 5 win over Cleveland. “Because then you have to nut up and do a bunch of shit you don’t want to do … Every game is going to be different, every series is going to be different, regardless of who we play is going to be different. Sometimes it’s different matchups, different lineups. Just gotta do it.”
Anyone in the NBA can diagram a play. Any group of coaches can come together and figure out a defensive strategy. The league is full of great basketball minds. The key is getting players to do what’s being asked of them.
“You can only be as good as your players are willing to be and willing to accept,” Mazzulla said. “They've always been open-minded, they've always wanted to be coached, they've always understood what it takes to win. It just takes time to go through different processes. So we can't get to any point unless the guys are willing to do it and willing to do it together.”
This has been, and it remains, Mazzulla’s biggest challenge. A potential Game 7 of the upcoming Eastern Conference Finals will be June 2, exactly eight months after media day. That is a lot of time for this flight to hit turbulence. And it’s especially tough with the playoff spotlight getting brighter and hotter. Humility will be tested more than ever, especially in the face of the paradoxical task of players needing to step their games up over one final month.
Doing more, and doing it better, while also recognizing the game might ask you to do nothing at times, is a serious mental test. Mazzulla’s unconventional approach has helped power his team to this point. Can it get them to eight more wins?
“I think we're so talented and I think our biggest step has been, how do we mentally bridge that gap with our talent?” Pritchard said. “If we become mentally as strong as we are talented, then we’re really dangerous.”