Another pep talk for Joe Mazzulla

Comedian and writer Josh Gondelman returns with some words of encouragement for the NBA's rarest coaching bird.

A year ago exactly, Basketball Feelings graciously published my preseason pep talk for Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla. In the wake of Boston’s championship I encouraged the famously intense Mazzulla to allow himself to breathe, to tone down the intensity, to (quoting myself here, embarrassingly) “take a low-dose chill pill.”

I realize now that ease is not in the man’s nature.

In his three seasons (and counting) as head coach of the Boston Celtics, we have learned about many things he loves: Brazilian jiu jitsu, pressure, his players, the movie The Town, math, blood. Mazzulla is an intense guy, the kind of person who seems like he might beat a child at a hundred straight games of tic tac toe (or Connect 4, Rondo-style) to teach them a lesson about perseverance and adaptation. His obsessiveness is not a dial that can be turned up or down, but a switch, duct-taped in the ON position. The lead-up to this nascent season has felt deeply in keeping with his M.O. (Mazzulla Operations).

Two weeks ago, instead of supervising an intra-beat writer scrimmage as scheduled, Mazzulla declared that the media members would play a twelve-minute game against the Celtics coaches. The team staff, including two former NBA players and several former college stars on top of that, won by a score of 57-4. CelticsBlog writer Noa Dalzell chronicled the beating with grace and humor, concluding:

The game served as an (unneeded) reminder of the ridiculous disparity between us regular people and elite athletes. (Believe it or not, there were multiple former college basketball players among us.)

And, it was especially humbling to remember that, as massive as the gap was between the coaching staff and the media, the Celtics players themselves are in a whole other stratosphere.

The preseason ferocity did not stop at the ritual humiliation of local newspaper writers and bloggers. On an episode of Netflix’s The Real Basketballstars of the NBA aka Starting 5, Mazzulla responded to a question about who would win a fight between him and (2024 Finals MVP) Jaylen Brown, which is a very Joe Mazzulla question to respond to.

“He may win in one fight, but either he’s gonna win or we’re both gonna die. If I’m going to taste death, [he’s] coming with me,” Mazzulla stated.

Here’s the thing about that: Most fights are not to the death. If you lose a fight, you usually do not die. And you don’t win a fight only if your opponent’s heart stops pumping blood. Often, one person simply decides that their ass has been thoroughly kicked, and the other person stops kicking it. Most people, even in the heat of battle, have a sense of their limits. Also, many would consider speculating about murdering a co-worker in hand-to-hand combat to be, let’s say, over the line.

But Mazzulla escalating the stakes of a question about a fight by invoking the specter of death was not surprising. As a coach, at least, he is a man of extremes; he’s constantly testing the upper boundaries of his team’s capacity. How many games can a squad that has already locked in a #1 seed by a wide margin win? How many open three-pointers can they launch per game? How many times can one man watch the same Jeremy Renner performance?

Each of Mazzulla’s first three seasons in charge of the C’s bench has come with an immense weight of expectation. His first season followed the team’s sprint to the Finals under then-dismissed coach Ime Udoka. His second campaign led to a championship. His third was (naturally) a title defense. And, as spectators, we are made to understand that victory sometimes calls for extreme measure. Players tax their bodies beyond reason. Coaches exhaust themselves poring over film and drawing up schemes. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, or seeks to wear the crown even.

This season’s Celtics team does not face a similar level of pressure. Jayson Tatum is out for the season (OR IS HE????) and several key contributors to the 2024 championship have left Boston for reasons both competitive and financial. Though many talented players will be in action, the expectations have been deflated, for this year at least.

With apologies to Nadasurf, perhaps this weightlessness is a gift. Pressure creates diamonds, but not out of everything. And while it was wrong for me to ask Joe Mazzulla to temper his innate passion, I hope that this season he applies his laser focus not to a goal of victory at all costs, but in the spirit of exploration. To gently mix musical metaphors here, a jazz musician is not a poorer performer for blowing their horn with less force. Maybe, then, some of this season could be about the minutes Jaylen Brown doesn’t play, if you catch my drift. Maybe instead of approaching a shot diet of 100% three-point jumpers, Mazzulla can find new horizons to probe.

To put things in the coach’s beloved mathematical terms: There is only so close you can get to a theoretical limit. Maybe this year is chance to interrogate what’s possible along another axis. What does it look like to apply force without pressure? I think you’ll survive an attempt to find out.