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Joe Mazzulla inherited a Boston Celtics roster contemporary off a visit to the NBA Finals. He spent his first season studying the ropes as a head coach and dealing with a training employees who seemingly noticed him as a peer reasonably than the crew’s new chief. Over the summer season, Brad Stevens revamped Mazzulla’s bench and gave him a fair deeper pool of gamers to work with.
The upside is evident: the Celtics dominated the regular-season. They sprinted away with the primary seed within the Jap Convention. They clutched one of the best report within the league near their chest. They had been one of the best offensive crew and second-best defensive crew within the NBA.
The draw back is a bit more nuanced. With a lot domination, we’ve seldom seen how Mazzulla coaches underneath stress. We all know he likes to let his crew determine it out, which regularly results in a timeout not being known as. What we don’t know is how impactful his in-game changes may be. There merely haven’t been sufficient shut video games to power Mazzulla into making a number of modifications on the fly. It’s the identical motive it’s exhausting to guage his clutch-time teaching — these conditions are so few and much between that the info is restricted.
Within the inaugural episode of The Celtics Chronicle podcast — which I’ve launched as a substitute to The CelticsPod — I contemplated Mazzulla’s teaching and what we’re but to see from him.
Throughout his tenure with the Celtics, we’ve seen Mazzulla thrive when making game-to-game changes. He is been constantly profitable when he has time to go away, watch the sport tape, analyze the info, and implement some tweaks. After all of the Celtics got here again from 3-0 down in opposition to the Miami Warmth within the 2023 Jap Convention Finals. Extra just lately, they tore by way of Erik Spoelstra’s crew in sport 3 of the present collection after Miami had shocked them with a win in sport 2.
It’s that juxtaposition between game-to-game alterations and in-the-moment planning that strikes me as attention-grabbing. Can Mazzulla make changes within the warmth of the second? As a result of it’s these minute alterations that may swing a sport. And it’s those self same alterations that make Spoelstra probably the greatest at patrolling the sidelines.
In some unspecified time in the future throughout the postseason, we are going to see Mazzulla’s in-game administration get examined. It received’t be the primary time we’ve seen it, nevertheless it received’t be one thing we’re used to experiencing. Similar to his gamers want pressuring testing, so does he. It’s an attention-grabbing idea to ponder as we head into Recreation 4 of the playoffs, particularly contemplating the Warmth will likely be trying to even the collection.
You may hearken to the total episode of the Celtics Chronicle podcast on Apple or Spotify.
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