Entering Year 5, what should we make of Joe Mazzulla?

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…

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Publish date : 2026-09-20 10:00:00

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