Things are going to be different for the Celtics this season. Last season, they were very close to last in the league in pace. This year?
“I can already tell you we’re going to be the fastest team in the league,” newcomer Josh Minott told Boston Sports Journal after the team’s first official practice of the 2025-26 season.
The new guys might be the best judges of how fast the team will play. They are trying to fit in and learn what Joe Mazzulla wants from his team. Minott and his Timberwolves-turned-Celtics teammate Luka Garza are fighting for their basketball lives this year, so they are hyper-focused on exactly what the team wants to do. And this team wants to run.
“You could tell right since I got here that that’s the focus this year,” Garza said. “What we want to do is get up and down and push the pace and get into actions early and be able to move the ball around and score and kind of use all sides of the floor while doing that. I think coach said today, we’re not just gonna play like that, we’re gonna practice like that. So, that was evident from the structure of the practice.”
If the sweat dripping off the assistant coaches as they left the floor was any indication, Garza and Minott weren’t lying.
“This is a different vibe of training camp with younger guys than before, so we got after it,” Xavier Tillman said. “Running around a lot. Coaches screaming, you're kind of just turning your head, getting to the next spot, but it was fun. It was good.”
The Celtics are both evolving and making necessary adjustments to maximize the guys in camp. Two of Boston’s slowest players from last season, Jrue Holiday, and Kristaps Porziņģis, are gone. A third, Jayson Tatum, is watching from the sidelines, presumably, for a majority of the season. The Celtics have different players with different strengths, so what used to work doesn’t apply the same way anymore.
“I think you're always looking at building the strengths of your roster,” Mazzulla said. “What makes the most sense and gives us the best chance to play?”
Don’t expect the Celtics to be a Mike D’Antoni “seven seconds or less” clone. For Boston, it’s about getting away from the stopping and surveying the defense to look for exploitable weaknesses. All those guys who aren’t on the floor are elite players capable of creating their own shots. This roster has to bend and break the defense to keep probing for good looks.
“It’s not just chuck it and shoot it with 20 seconds on the shot clock,” Garza said. “It’s trying to get into actions early so we can get looks early and if it’s not there you go to the second or third action. It’s just, everything you do is with a fast pace. You see a lot of teams that get the ball and walk it up. I’ve been on teams like that before, and that’s not what we’re trying to do.”
What Mazzulla is trying to do is build a new mentality for his team.
“Playing fast, I think, is an overused term,” he said. “I think it's more of a mindset and overall approach to the way you execute, the way you move the ball, the way also you defend. So we'll just take a look at our roster and see what gives us the best chance to put us in position to win every night, and we’ll do that.”
Day one for the Celtics was full of energy and enthusiasm, but that's fleeting and not what was important to Mazzulla. He’s trying to rewire the Celtics.
“You don't really want to rely on enthusiasm,” he said. “You want to rely on the passion, the details, the work ethic, and the mindset, so really it's just about being consistent. Having a consistent mindset, having a consistent approach, a consistent dedication to the details and the system that we're trying to play. We should be acting, coaching, playing, thinking, working the same way we do two months from now the same way we did today. That’s the most important thing.”
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TILLMAN FEELING GOOD
Xavier Tillman is coming off a tough season.
“From just a playing perspective, it was very hard,” he admitted after practice. “Just wanting to play, wanting to contribute, but I also knew I was going through stuff myself. My knee would have days where it would just swell up into a balloon after I had one scrimmage or stuff like that. So I knew consistency-wise I could be there to kind of support. But as far as my actual play, I couldn't do everything I wanted to do.”
Tillman has slimmed down, dropping 12 pounds heading into this season by switching up his diet, employing a chef to help with his eating habits. The result was a summer that was relatively pain-free.
“I think it's made it easier for me to be consistent with my work and be consistent with how hard I go,” Tillman said. “(Before), if I have a flareup, I’ve got to take a couple days and stuff like that.”
A healthier knee means Tillman will give himself more of a chance to earn minutes in a front court that went from loaded, to loaded with opportunities.
“I did learn a ton from KP and from Al (Horford) and from Luke (Kornet) on just their preparation and how they took every day,” he said. “All you can do is keep preparing. Keep preparing and don't take it for granted. When you get those minutes, go hard. You don't have to be perfect, but you’ve gotta go hard. Take advantage of it.”
The opportunity for minutes will be there, not just because other guys are gone, but because Boston is going to be asking a lot of their frontcourt guys.
“Think of a NASCAR pit stop where you just don't stop moving … as soon as you go in, the guys are exchange, exchange and we're out,” he explained. “It's a lot of actions at half court, setting a lot of picks and stuff like that. Depending on your game, if you're a popper or a roller, mixing in the two. The frontcourt, we’re going to have to run a lot. For sure.”
The running will test Tillman’s knee, which received two stem cell injections in January and March of last season. Tillman says those helped, and his knee swelling is at its lowest point since joining the Celtics. A stretching regimen is also helping him keep him on the floor, and he says that's allowed him to improve his 3-point shooting. Instead of being forced to rest, Tillman has put in countless reps and extra shooting sessions, all of which have given him more confidence in his shot, and his chances to contribute.
“I come in each day and I work my butt off and then depending on the schedule we’ve got, I come back at night and get extra shots up,” Tillman said. “So I just leave it to the work that I do and I think that it's going to pay off in terms of opportunities.”
TAYLOR JENKINS DROPS BY
Former Memphis Grizzlies head coach Taylor Jenkins was a special guest at Celtics practice on Tuesday.
Taylor Jenkins is a guest at Celtics practice today pic.twitter.com/ysnGES5lxr
— John Karalis 🇬🇷 (@John_Karalis) September 30, 2025
“It was great to see him first and foremost,” Tillman said of his former coach. “I ain't seen him since (Desmond Bane)'s wedding two summers ago, so it was great to see him. He was just here kind of seeing how we do things around here. He told me he's taking the year off, so just spending a lot of time with his family. But he's taken a couple times and opportunities to come check out other teams, see how they operate, see what he can take from their game and mold into his when he gets back into it.”
GARZA’S ROLLER COASTER RIDE
Garza didn’t expect his career to go like this. He was a two-time Sporting News College Player of the Year at Iowa and the first Hawkeye to be a two-time consensus All-American and Big Ten Player of the Year. But he fell to the late second round of the draft and spent years on two-way contracts with Detroit and Minnesota before finally getting a guaranteed deal.
That all fell apart as he fell to the bottom of Minnesota’s front-court depth chart. Now he’s in Boston after being released by the Timberwolves, hoping everything has been building towards something.
“It’s been an experience. It’s been a lot of ups and downs,” he said. “It definitely tested me mentally, especially with my confidence. Coming in I had such a high, almost, and then getting humbled right away. I think it was good for me, good for my career and good for me as a human being to kind of go through that. … I think this opportunity came at the perfect time for me.”
Garza has a nice offensive game, and he’s hoping that will help him on a team looking to play at a high place and explore multiple offensive options on each possession. The key, for him, is to catch on with the nuances of Boston’s approach. His experiences before coming to Boston will help.
“I've kind of been through it,” Garza said. “I'm always just a curious learner so I'm always open to new things, new structures or new mindsets of how they do things, and so, I think here is definitely the most detailed place I've been in terms of a lot of a lot of the things we do. It’s just the structure is a lot more detailed, and I love that. And so it's been a lot of fun to kind of be here and learn.”
