Joe Mazzulla is one of a kind. When he’s not watching “The Town” or avoiding revolving doors or torturing overmatched reporters in pickup basketball, he’s known to give some memorable press conferences.
Most recently, a kid reporter from SI Kids asked Mazzulla, at Kids Day at the Garden, how he balances pushing his players with keeping the game fun. Did we mention it was a kid reporter from a kid publication on Kids Day at the Garden? This is an important point.
“I struggle with that, to be honest with you,” Mazzulla replied. “I think everyone has a different definition of fun. You have to find one as a team. I think fun is a cop out sometimes. When things aren’t going well everybody likes to say ‘well, let’s just have fun.’ It’s like, well, what does that mean? I think you have to define what fun looks like as a team and you kind of have to go after it. That phrase can be a cop out sometimes. So as you get older, kid, don’t use it.”
So as you get older, kid, don’t use it.
Even if Mazzulla wasn’t impervious to whimsy, this Celtics season never felt like it was going to lend itself to him sending his guys out on the floor to just have fun anyway. Boston left fun in the rearview the moment Jayson Tatum blew out his Achilles. After that, one of the most stable organizations in the NBA was left to dismantle what it had meticulously built and reconfigure on the fly.
Maybe that was going to happen even if Tatum had remained healthy, but once he got hurt, taking a gap year was the obvious play. Out went Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, Al Horford and Luke Kornet as cost-cutting casualties who were sold off to avoid the franchise having to pay roughly half a billion dollars for a roster that would be without its best player. Just two seasons ago, the Celtics steamrolled their way to their 18th championship and people were wondering if a dynasty might be dawning. Now Neemias Queta is starting and Mazzulla has a rotation with 11 different players averaging at least 10 minutes per game.
It has been a weird season for the Celtics. They’ve gone from knowing exactly who they are and how they want to play to the basketball equivalent of an “Eat, Pray, Love” journey to find themselves . Night to night they are chaos agents, as capable of losing to the Jazz by two as they are of smacking the Cavs by 20. Maybe Celtics fans who were accustomed to consistency and regular wins don’t feel this way, but, as a neutral observer, Boston’s unpredictability has made for tremendous content.
The Celtics of recent vintage have had a defined theory of the case: play staunch defense while taking and making the most threes in the NBA, as they did in each of the last two seasons. Maybe you could catch them on a cold shooting night or maybe they go into a funk for a stretch, but they were betting that their personnel would win the math game more times than not. To an extent, the Celtics are still trying to play that way, just with an expanded cast of characters that’s not nearly as suited to it as the teams that preceded this one. And let’s not forget that certain players are having to shoulder more of the offensive load than ever before due to Tatum being out and several of their key contributors from previous seasons are now playing elsewhere.
Derrick White is averaging 15.4 field goal attempts (by far the most of his career) but he’s off to an icy shooting start (35.9 from the field and 30.5 from deep). Both are career lows, though his counting stats from assists to steals to blocks remain considerable. Last year’s Sixth Man of the Year Payton Pritchard was uneven early (and hard on himself about it), but has been considerably better of late. Sharpshooter Sam Hauser hasn’t really been sharp at all and is posting career lows in field-goal and three-point percentages. Among the notable holdovers, only former Finals MVP Jaylen Brown has regularly leveled up, averaging 27.5 points on 50.3 percent shooting from the field. Both are career bests.
Despite not having the same offensive arsenal they once boasted, there have been glimmers. The Celtics still like to fire from deep. Boston is second in three-point attempts per game and sixth in three-pointers made. They’re sixth in offensive rating, 11th in defensive rating, eighth in net rating and have the third-best point differential in the Eastern Conference. That all looks pretty good at first glance. But even after beating the Brooklyn Nets on Tuesday, the Celtics are 8-7 and just inside the play-in.
There’s a case to be made that they could be 10-5 with this bunch — or just as easily 5-10.
They’re not great in transition (26th in fast break points) or down low (29th points in the paint) and they’re one of just seven teams playing at a slower pace than last season. But their bunch of scrappy try-hards have been fairly effective at slowing down other teams in transition (eighth in opponents fast break points) and they’ve been excellent at limiting the competition from scoring off their mistakes (first in opponents points off turnovers).
It all distills down to a team with a wider variance of outcomes night-to-night than what we’re used to seeing from the usually steady Boston Celtics. They’re not the set-it-and-forget-it lineup that was all but assured of making deep playoff runs for the last several seasons. They are, however, a franchise that got out from what would have been a crushing second apron situation and continue to be a tough opponent most evenings while waiting for Tatum to mend. In a season that everyone in Boston knew would come with certain difficulties, that’s not bad. That’s not nothing. It has even been, at times and with apologies to Mazzulla, fun in its own way.
The other night in the win at Brooklyn, there was a sequence that summed up this Celtics experience nicely when they missed three 3s in a row on the same possession but got all the rebounds. Boston TV analyst Brian Scalabrine watched it unfold and squealed with delight “championship-caliber squad! They’ve been there before.” If that’s no entertainment, nothing is.
