Joe Mazzulla swears, as he is wont to do, that September is ushering in an end to a largely normal summer.
“It hasn’t really been any different than any other summer we’ve had since we’ve been in the NBA,” Mazzulla said in an exclusive one-on-one interview.
Yup. Just a normal summer riding duckboats through confetti in Boston and running around New England with the Larry O’Brien trophy. Nothing to see here.
Except, obviously, there is. The Celtics are still basking in the afterglow of their 18th banner. They go to experience a championship parade, which Mazzulla spent much of flexing, screaming, and high-fiving fans.
“I had to match the energy of the people,” he said. “It was a release, because it was one of the times where I could be as intense as the people around me. It was like an intensity and a passion, but I was really mirroring the people. … This is the most intense, passionate thing I've ever been a part of.”
The duck boats were turned back over to the tourists, but the trophy has barely stopped moving. Everyone on the team has been lining up to book their date with Larry O.B. so they can show off the hardware. One of Mazzulla’s final stops on his trophy tour was back in his home state of Rhode Island, where he met fans at the State House, the town hall in his hometown of Johnston, and back through his old stomping grounds at Bishop Hendricken High School.
“It's funny, I still felt, I don't know if 'inadequate' is the word, but my high school coach has won 15 state championships, has won seven in a row, and four in a row twice,” Mazzulla said. “It felt like I'm almost where he's at.”
Humility is a big deal for Mazzulla, who used the word regularly throughout last season. The concept is a tough one to hammer home at the NBA level, where control of egos, including one’s own, is a constant battle. Some might say it’s the biggest battle for a coach, especially one trying to push an immensely talented roster in a single direction.
Mazzulla is intent on not falling into the trappings of success. One month from today, he and his Celtics will be taking on the Denver Nuggets in their preseason opener in Abu Dhabi. If the page hasn’t been turned to the 2024-25 season yet, they’d better at least have the page in their fingers as they finish up one last paragraph. So he practices humility for all to see, and he finds examples for his team everywhere he can.
Including the now infamous killer whale analogy Sam Hauser hinted at during the NBA Finals.
“To me, the killer whale are obviously the most forceful animal in nature,” he said. “But they have the humility. They very rarely attack their prey by themselves. And so you have this concept of ‘I know I could kill you by myself, but I'm not going to do it unless I have my pod with me.’ They only attack in three and four so, like, there's a huge humility aspect to that.”
Replace killer whale with Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown and the concept becomes pretty clear. And for Mazzulla, using a predator’s natural instincts carries more weight than just trying to use clips of unselfish basketball players. Mazzulla doesn’t care if someone like Jrue Holiday calls him crazy so long as everyone understands that the lessons they need to learn and keep with them exist everywhere.
“I think just studying the animal kingdom in general gives you a direct sense of humility, pride, hierarchy, self-awareness,” Mazzulla said. “You have to be all those things if you want to survive … the animal kingdom is the most purest form of hierarchy and role definition that there is. Everybody plays their role. If you step outside of it, you get killed.”
If lions and tigers and bears aren’t enough to hammer Mazzulla’s point home, he already has a plan to show the Celtics clips of Blue Jays to illustrate his point.
The Toronto Blue Jays.
On June 25th, the Celtics went to Fenway Park to celebrate their title. They threw out first pitches and retreated to a box to watch the Sox come back for a thrilling 7-6 walkoff win. Brown joked that Mazzulla would have them all playing shortstop in a future practice because Mazzulla probably took something from the game.
He was mostly right.
“I just finished clipping that game up last week,” Mazzulla said. “The Blue Jays are up six to two, and the Red Sox are dead in the water, and it's the bottom of the seventh. And then there's a there's a routine fundamental infield fly ball, and the Blue Jays let it fall …
“The storyline is, it's the fundamentals. The storyline is, it doesn't matter whether you win a championship or not. You have to commit to the details, and you have to have to have an understanding of what goes into winning and losing. … they lose in the bottom of the ninth and if they catch that fly ball in the seventh inning, the game's probably over. And so like you have to understand what goes into winning and losing on a consistent basis.”
Mazzulla admits that, aside from the last hour of his day when he allows himself to watch a show, there is nothing he experiences for pure entertainment. As his team was sipping champagne and watching the Sox comeback, Mazzulla was taking mental notes. He did the same thing during a recent trip with his wife, Camai, to the US Open, when he charted unforced errors and how often players communicated with coaches. He even did it during a Broadway show when he paid attention to how actors regulated their breathing between talking and singing. He took his family to Paris for the Olympics and took in different events, some of which will make their way into Celtics practices as well.
“We're definitely going to be practicing baton passing and relay passing,” Mazzulla said, explaining his takeaway from watching track and field. “It's a simple, simple thing that they probably practice over and over and over again and got it right. And it's not about practicing it over and over again, it's like, can you do the simplest things under the highest amount of duress? And that, to me, is the challenge of our future.”
Mazzulla doesn’t like to call this upcoming season a title defense, but whatever it is will come with its share of ups and downs that need to be navigated. Creating that duress so they can learn how to navigate choppy seas has always been part of Mazzulla’s practice playbook, but it’s going to be tougher now that almost everyone on the team has a brand new championship ring.
“Your mindset can't change,” Mazzulla said. “You have to understand what goes into winning and losing. You have to understand the mental toughness that goes into it, and you have to commit to the details on a daily basis.”
And at the same time, things have to go their way.
“That Indiana series was by far the toughest series, and we swept them, but it should have went seven,” he said. “You have to have an understanding that we have to fight for the things that we can control but there's so much that goes on that you can't control. We're trying to foul up three and give (Aaron) Nesmith a wide open corner 3. If he makes that and we go in the overtime on the road, it's a completely different game. … There's a list of things that I wrote down that I'm like. Here are all the things that happened that we had no control over, and we got to practice this list of things to try and gain a little bit more control over. But there's still stuff that you have to surrender to within a game.”
It’s hard to imagine in early September, now that the rough edges of last season have faded, that a 64-win team that lost only three playoff games on their way to a championship, returning almost everyone, would face much adversity. They're everyone’s favorites to win it again, but Mazzulla says that doing it means recommitting to a proven formula of trust and sacrifice.
“I just had full belief in if we did this together, and if we focused on the things that were the most important, didn't get bogged down by the things that really didn't matter, if we stuck to this formula, we would reap the benefits,” Mazzulla said, looking back on what it took to win a championship. “If we commit to this together, and if we go about this unconventional process, it's got great potential to work. But you gotta know that it might not. And credit to the guys for making a decision, trusting our process of what we think goes into winning.”
Mazzulla know that just because that approach worked last season, it doesn't mean it will work again. They’ll need to catch some breaks along the way, just like they did last season and every champion did before that. There might be times when they look like world-beaters, and some when they look lost.
A new story is written every season. Mazzulla welcomes whatever challenges this new one brings.
“I wish we started tomorrow … I hope it's even 10 times harder than it was last year,” he said. “People are going to say the target's on our back, but I hope it's right on our forehead, in between our eyes. I hope I can see the red dot.”
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You can see the entire interview in two parts on the Locked On Celtics podcast. Part one will go up later tonight, with part two posting tomorrow night.