I made the mistake of recently asking Joe Mazzulla a question based on the assumption that the top three seeds were set. The reason for the question was to see if the Celtics were going to do anything different over these next few weeks. I thought maybe he would give us a hint about guys resting, different lineup combinations, or something out of the ordinary to watch for over the remaining dozen or so games.
He was not buying my premise.
“I don’t think anything, for me, is locked in,” he said. “We gotta win … I think now it’s just continuing to execute the things that we need to. Each game is a different challenge.”
My mistake was that I think like a regular person when Mazzulla is anything but. He's the head coach of the NBA champion trying to get his team in position to do it all over again. He cannot have his players hearing him talk about the regular season being over, because it is not. At the time of the question, the Celtics still had to play the Brooklyn Nets. On Friday night, they had to play the Utah Jazz, and now on Sunday, they have to play the Portland Trail Blazers.
You can I can brush past these games and call them meaningless. As much as we’d all like to fantasize about the Cavs collapsing and fumbling the top seed, it’s not very likely to happen. We can just assume they’ll grab the second seed and move forward from there.
But Mazzulla needs his players to buy into the process of winning every game, no matter the circumstance. He needs them to do it now because they weren’t doing it to start the season when they were bombing 3-pointers and barely playing any defense. They definitely weren’t doing it during their mid-December swoon.
But that has turned around. The Celtics are becoming more focused as the playoffs draw closer. They understand this is the time to start taking everything more seriously. So Mazzulla won't let someone like me trick him into treating these games as something other than what he believes they are: the current challenge that must be accepted by his players.
“It’s Joe’s job to get us going for these games,” Kristaps Porzingis told reporters in Utah. “He’s doing a good job. He’s encouraging us to take it as a challenge, each of these games, especially these kinds of teams. They're a bit dangerous because they try different stuff to see if something can go their way and they can steal a game from us.”
It would be very easy for a team in Boston’s position to start playing out the string. They are well aware of how to flip a switch, so it would not have been surprising to see them coast through three quarters and try to turn it on at the end.
Instead, they were the aggressors, piling up steals and second-chance points to take a 17-point lead in the first quarter. They did have some patches of the game where they were going through the motions, but then they got right back to where they were to start the night. When the Jazz cut the lead to two, Boston regrouped and went on a 13-0 run.
“I thought we needed to take it to another level, and credit to our guys, they took it to another level,” Mazzulla said. “We got some live-ball turnovers, got out in transition, got some stops.”
This is all still a work in progress. Porzingis is working his way back from an illness and he’s not feeling 100%. Jaylen Brown did not play in Utah and will miss the Portland game due to a bone bruise in his knee. The Celtics haven't had their normal rotations and may not for a while.
But none of that matters to Mazzulla, who will forever be hellbent on winning with what you’re given on a particular day. Any day you have been disadvantaged is a gift because you get a chance to figure out a new way to win. The more ways you can figure out how to win, the more often you’ll come out on top. To Mazzulla, each game is a chance to either learn something new for the next time or to reinforce tried and true approaches. You either win by winning, or you win by learning something new to use the next time.
We don’t know what specific challenges the playoffs will bring, but by giving everything against Utah, they might have stumbled on a way to win a future game here or there.
“I appreciate the guys’ competitive nature, them wanting to win,” Mazzulla said. “It’s a tough place to play, they're a talented team so they're going to go on runs, but I appreciate their mindset. At the end of the day, we’ve got to win, we’ve got to do it the right way, and do it through a process. So, we did that tonight, we have to keep it up.”
