Subscribe
Follow Us
After a two-year stint as the head coach at Fairmont State, Joe Mazzulla was hired away by the Boston Celtics to join Brad Stevens' staff in the summer of 2019. From the second row of the bench, Mazzulla remained on the Celtics staff even after Boston hired Ime Udoka to be their head coach. Mazzulla was then promoted to interim head coach, and eventually permanent head coach, after Udoka was suspended for all of what was expected to be his second season on the Celtics bench.
Despite a 57-25 record and an Eastern Conference Finals appearance in his first season as Boston's head coach, many Celtics fans remained skeptical of whether Joe Mazzulla was the right man for the job. The 2023-24 season not only dispelled those concerns… it elevated Mazzulla to the top tier of the league's best coaches. Yes, Mazzulla had an absolutely stacked Celtics roster at his disposal, but all year long he pushed the right buttons, played the right guys, and never blinked in the face of adversity or sky-high championship-or-bust expectations.
In the end, the Celtics didn't bust. After a 64-18 regular season in which Boston finished with the 4th-best net rating in NBA history, the Celts captured the 18th NBA Title in franchise history. With the title win, Joe Mazzulla became the youngest head coach to win an NBA Title since Bill Russell did so as a 35-year-old in 1969.
Since winning the title, Celtics players have been in high demand for media appearances. Recently, reserve forward Sam Hauser was a guest on the Green Light Podcast with Chris Long, and he shared a bizarre, yet ultimately successful tactic that Mazzulla used during Boston's championship season.
“So his favorite animal is an orca whale, or a killer whale. So he pulled up this clip from National Geographic and it's these three orca whales hunting this seal, and they kind of pop their head out of the water and check out where this seal is at and it's on this isolated piece of ice in the middle of the ocean. And they're kind of scoping it out, and then they all attack this seal and kill it. And his like message was, ‘You know killer whales don't do it on their own, they wait for the others to attack their prey before they kill it, and that's what we got to do this year is do it together and nobody can do it on their own.'
The sentiment behind this unusual message turned out to be the super power of the 2023-24 Boston Celtics. Nobody ever had to do it on their own.
How do the Celtics respond to Joe Mazzulla?
From there, Chris Long asked Sam Hauser what portion of the team responded well to Joe Mazzulla's unorthodox coaching tactics. Given the clip that the Celtics have won at under Mazzulla, it's not a surprise that the buy-in rate has been pretty high.
“I’d say it’s upwards of 75 percent,” Sam Hauser responded. “You know, a couple of movie clips in there that maybe I don’t think everybody knows the movie clips he shows sometimes. It’s a lot of The Town, Whiplash, a lot of UFC fights, the orca whale thing. I think there was a lion, one where it killed a gazelle or something.”
As unusual as it may seem, it's becoming more and more clear that everything Joe Mazzulla does has a defined purpose. Those buttons he's pressing, the clips he's showing his team, they continue to pay off in the long run, and because of that, there's a very good chance that a second consecutive NBA Title could be coming the way of the Boston Orcas Celtics next year.
