Joe Mazzulla Was Never Going Anywhere
Celtics architect Brad Stevens announced earlier this week that Joe Mazzulla will return next season as the team's head coach. In retrospect, even after getting down 0-3 to the Miami Heat, this was a fairly obvious decision that was cemented in the direct aftermath of Game 7. Let's go through the three reasons why I believe this to be the case.
Reason No. 1: Mazzulla Was Really Good This Season
I know, we all quibble on the margins. He's not playing Payton Pritchard. He's not playing Grant Williams. He won't do double bigs. Why isn't Robert Williams III starting? But when you take a step back, you realize that the reason we are able to quibble about those things is because they're the only things about which to quibble.
It can't be stated enough times that Mazzulla got this job two days before Media Day. He didn't have months to prepare for training camp. He jumped into it on the fly. We want to believe all these decisions are plug and play. They're not. And the situation was even more complicated than that because when he had to jump in and create a system on the fly, it wasn't able to include Rob, because he was still rehabbing from surgery.
Seeing Rob so consistently in the playoffs definitely blunted my memories of him over the season. Rob missed the first 29 games, and then missed another eight consecutive games in March. In the regular season, he never played more than five consecutive games, and that only happened twice: January 12-21 and February 23-March 3. It was after that second block of time that he missed those aforementioned eight games. Up through that game on March 3rd, Rob had played 28 games, starting 18, and had averaged 24.2 minutes per game. In the final seven regular season games he played after that injury break, he played 20.7 minutes per game, and in the playoffs he played a near-identical 20.9 minutes per game. The team clearly made the decision that this was all he could handle, and that 20 minutes in every game was better than 24-30 until the game in which he got hurt. That's hard to game plan around. Mazzulla did it.
On a macro level, the Celtics led the NBA in Net Rating, and were the only team in the top five in offense and defense. You don't get to those ratings and rankings with a bad coach. By the math, Boston's record was the record they earned. Milwaukee and Cleveland both overachieved their Pythagorean wins (expected wins based on points scored and allowed) – Cleveland by four wins, Milwaukee by eight. Why did Milwaukee lose in the first round? Maybe it's because they weren't that good to begin with! The C's blew the doors off them twice, and in the game they rested their entire starting lineup they took Milwaukee to OT on the road.
Things didn't quite break right in the end, but it's incredibly hard to win in the NBA, as Shaq and Kenny remind Chuck of approximately 13,000 times per season. The Celtics were very successful this season, and Mazzulla does deserve credit for that.
Reason No. 2: Jayson Tatum Needs Stability
My friend Chad Finn already said this plainly, and I'm annoyed he beat me to the punch, but he's right, as usual – this is Jayson Tatum's team and the team needs to start acting like it. You know what Tatum doesn't need? A fourth coach in as many seasons. Brad Stevens in 2020-21, Ime Udoka in 2021-22, Joe Mazzulla in 2022-23, and Coach X in 2023-24 would have been an impossible situation in which to put an MVP candidate.
Make no mistake about it – Tatum is no worse than a top five MVP candidate next season. If I had to rank it right this second, it would be: 1. Nikola Jokić, 2. Jayson Tatum, 3. Devin Booker (get ready for the Bookassaince now), 4. Giannis Antetokounmpo, 5. Joel Embiid (he got his trophy, he'll never get another, especially not with a crazy person as his coach. Don't underestimate how much the media loves Doc Rivers as a factor in why Embiid finally got his trophy. You don't think Doc was quietly lobbying his media buddies? Come on now.). Maybe you'd quibble with the rankings, but to me it's pretty clear that what Tatum really needs is 12 months of stability to fine tune his game and elevate it one more time. Don't forget, in December, Tatum was ranked first on 98 of 100 "ballots" in Tim Bontemps' first straw poll of the season. He slipped a little after that – his cold stretch from three after the All-Star break was probably what put the final nails in his MVP case – but Tatum is right there. As I wrote for Boston.com in April, the case is there. But another season of learning a new system, learning a new coach's tendencies, etc., would have just made it unnecessarily tough.
Reason No. 3: Tatum Said He Wanted Mazzulla Back
As NBA fans, we tend to pay a lot of attention to what people like LeBron James and Giannis say to the media. Mike Budenholzer was fired within a week of Giannis criticizing him for the first time. LeBron is so cryptic and deliberate in what he says that he keeps the media ecosystem running for days on the strength of one press conference or media availability. It's time to start paying attention to what Tatum says too. As a reminder, here's what he said about Mazzulla right after Game 7:
“It was his first year, we got to the conference finals Game 7,” Tatum said. “I don’t think people give him or us enough credit that, two days before season starts, we find out we’re going to have a new coach. We didn’t have Rob (Williams) the first 25, 30 games of the season, we never got a chance to have [Danilo Gallinari]. That was an adjustment. We all figured it out. Obviously, we wanted to win the championship. Didn’t happen. But I think Joe did a great job.”
Game, set, and match. In my opinion, once Tatum said that, Mazzulla's job was cemented.
I have a lot of thoughts that I want to get out about this offseason – I need to do more research first – but again, the thesis is that this is now Tatum's team, and the moves of the offseason need to be based primarily around that edict.