I recently started reading Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball, 17 years after it was published and several days after my partner asked why a book about basketball needed to be roughly the length of the Old Testament.
Growing up in Maine and loving all four major Boston sports teams (apologies, New England Revolution fans), I of course grew up reading Simmons. There’s something particularly fun about reading him now, when his NBA arguments from 2009 have had nearly two decades to either age gracefully or get run over by history.
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It’s a beast of a book, but most of it is basically Simmons trying to sort NBA history into something that makes sense: who mattered, what championships meant, how careers should be remembered and where everyone belongs.
Naturally, that got me doing the same thing with the Celtics, which led me to Joe Mazzulla.
I have absolutely no idea what bucket to put Joe Mazzulla in.
Four seasons into his head coaching career, Mazzulla has already been an emergency replacement, a guy Celtics fans weren’t sure could coach, the coach of one of the most dominant teams in league history and, most recently, the coach of a team that blew a 3-1 lead for the first time in franchise history.
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This would probably be easier to sort through if Mazzulla himself were slightly easier to decipher.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this is Joe Mazzulla we’re talking about.
A brief history of trying to figure out Joe
The strange part about evaluating Mazzulla is that we’ve done this dance before. Or at least, I have.
I wrote about him in April, mostly because the circumstances that made him Boston’s head coach already felt like ancient history. To recap that piece, Mazzulla was 34 when the Ime Udoka situation exploded days before training camp in 2022, inheriting a Finals team and approximately zero grace period to figure out what he was doing.
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Boston kept winning, but the question lingered: how much of that success actually belonged to Joe?
Then came the 2023 playoffs.
One talking point you likely remember from that run: the timeouts. Or, more accurately, the non-timeouts. Mazzulla had developed a habit of letting his players work through opposing runs rather than immediately stopping play, which is a perfectly reasonable coaching philosophy until you’re watching a 12-2 run become a 19-4 run and oh god we’re down by 15 now and he still hasn’t called a timeout.
There were questions about adjustments, late-game offense and the strange position Mazzulla found himself in: learning how to coach a championship contender while being judged like someone who should already know exactly how to do it. The Celtics fell behind Miami 3-0, nearly pulled off the first 3-0 comeback in NBA history and then got blown out at home in Game 7.
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By the end of the series, the criticism had gone well beyond timeout discourse. The Boston Globe ran a column titled “The Celtics need to move on from Joe Mazzulla,” arguing that Boston’s decision to hand him the job had backfired.
Maybe Boston had asked too much, too soon of a 34-year-old coach learning one of the hardest jobs in basketball on the fly.
Except next year, the Celtics went 64-18 and won the NBA championship.
Suddenly, the guy who seems like he might sit next to you on a flight, ask how deeply you sleep and then offer to “take first watch” had proven he wasn’t merely babysitting an immensely talented roster.
Mazzulla’s whole “give the game what it needs” philosophy stopped sounding like something you’d find printed above the dumbbells at a CrossFit gym (mental note: contact local CrossFit gym about “Give the gains what they need” licensing opportunity) and started looking like a pretty amazing way to play basketball.
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By the time I wrote about Mazzulla earlier this year, that was essentially my conclusion: Boston hadn’t planned for him, but he’d come to define the team anyway.
Five months later, I’m considerably less sure I know what the definition is.
Boston has now followed its championship with a second-round exit versus the Knicks (*slams head against keyboard*) and a first-round exit versus the Sixers (*slams head against remnants of said keyboard but a little harder*).
Both losses require context. Tatum tore his Achilles against New York, albeit with the series already tilting toward the Knicks. Against Philly, Embiid unlocked every available power while Paul George found whatever remained of the fountain of youth Brad Stevens buried beneath TD Garden after Al Horford took his final sip.
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None of that erases the championship, just like the championship doesn’t erase what came after it. Mazzulla’s results have been extreme enough that you can make him look like almost anything depending on where you decide to start the story.
Start in 2022 and he’s one of the great emergency hires in recent sports history.
Start with the 2023 playoffs and you see a young coach struggling to keep up with Erik Spoelstra as Miami kept pulling the right strings.
Start on June 17, 2024 and he’s a championship coach who oversaw one of the best teams in Celtics history.
Start with the last two postseasons and suddenly we’re talking about two agonizing exits that felt an awful lot like coming up short of expectations.
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At some point, evaluating NBA coaches starts to resemble evaluating peekaboo with a toddler. Joe’s gone. Joe’s back! Joe’s gone again. Nope, there he is!
So, is Joe Mazzulla actually a good coach?
Yes.
Probably.
Well, I think so.
The championship counts. So does the team’s identity, the way he handled being thrown into the job and the way his players talk about him. Neemias Queta said this summer that Mazzulla “makes that extra step, extra effort, just to make sure you feel comfortable,” adding: “He worries about people, and that’s why I’m running through a wall for him.”
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The playoff failures count, too. The problem is deciding how much weight to give any of it when every piece of evidence feels so extreme.
NBA coaches occupy a strange place in the way we talk about basketball because so much of their work is invisible. A player’s points are in the box score. Shooting efficiency can be measured down to the decimal. There is no box score for “Joe noticed something on film at 1:17 a.m. immediately after Googling whether sharks know when they’re being followed.”
So we fall back on results. Win, and the coach pushed the right buttons. Lose, and why the hell didn’t he push the other ones?
That shortcut is especially dangerous with Mazzulla. He inherited a Finals team, coached the Porzingis-Holiday version into a basketball death machine, lost Tatum to an Achilles tear and now has Brown in Philadelphia and half a new rotation.
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He’s also an exceptionally unhelpful narrator of his own career.
Ask Mazzulla about recognition and there’s a decent chance the conversation ends with the inevitability of death.
Maybe Mike Conley can help. Asked this week for his early impressions of Mazzulla, the 19-year NBA veteran started with, “I thought he was crazy before,” before laughing and clarifying that Joe is, in fact, not crazy. More importantly, Conley said working with him has made him feel like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. “There’s so much for me to learn about the game,” he said. “The way he sees the game is a different lens.”
So we know quite a bit about Mazzulla. We still don’t know exactly what kind of coach he’ll become.
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Which is why the next chapter might finally make the previous ones easier to read.
Give this team what it needs
For most of Mazzulla’s tenure, there has been one enormous complication in evaluating him: the Celtics have been incredibly talented.
Coaching great players is still coaching. As Isiah Thomas told Simmons in The Book of Basketball, the “secret” of basketball is that it isn’t really about basketball. Talent only gets you so far if five extremely rich adults would prefer not to spend another minute together.
The 2024 Celtics didn’t have that problem. They were almost absurdly well suited to Mazzulla’s vision: shooting everywhere, multiple ballhandlers, versatile defenders, Tatum and Brown in their primes, Holiday and White locking down the backcourt, Porzingis spacing the floor and Al Horford being Al Horford.
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There weren’t many problems that roster couldn’t solve.
This year is different. Brown is in Philadelphia, George is 36, Tatum is returning from his Achilles tear and several younger Celtics will be asked to contribute considerably more.
Asked this week how he envisions the identity of this year’s team, Mazzulla talked about the difference between what a team looks like on the court and what it becomes over the course of a season.
“I think there’s an on-court identity and then an identity that the season creates based on the challenges that are presented to you,” he said.
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A Mazzulla answer if I’ve ever heard one, but it’s also essentially the question we’re asking about him. “Give the game what it needs” is a lot easier when the game gives you Tatum, Brown, White, Holiday, Porzingis and Horford.
What happens when it gives you something else?
There’s a version of this season where Boston wins fewer games than it did last year and I come away more impressed with Mazzulla. If he can figure out what this group does well rather than trying to recreate what worked two years ago, that tells me more than another gaudy win total. On the flip side, another great regular season followed by the same playoff problems would make those last two exits a lot harder to explain away.
We already know Mazzulla can coach an excellent regular-season team. We know he can coach a championship team, too.
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Asked this week what he took from blowing a 3-1 lead to Philadelphia, Mazzulla started with himself: “How do I have to get better?” But he resisted treating those three losses as a singular referendum, saying he’s still pulling lessons from wins and losses dating back to his first season.
Now he has to apply all of it to something new.
So what do we do with Joe?
My answer? Nothing. Yet.
Slightly unsatisfying answer, sure, but Mazzulla has spent four years making definitive conclusions look stupid approximately six months after we make them.
His first season ended one game from the Finals. His second ended with a championship. The two since have ended too early. Depending on when you checked in, he’s been treated like a novice, a lunatic or a genius, sometimes within the same playoff series.
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Maybe this season finally makes the résumé easier to read.
Or maybe Joe wins 54 games, unveils a lineup featuring three centers and no point guard in March, starts making the team study competitive freediving to improve late-game composure, and explains the whole thing afterward by saying he saw a seagull outside the Auerbach Center that morning and “liked its mentality.”
Maybe the mistake was assuming Joe Mazzulla would ever fit into a tidy evaluation in the first place.
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