AGC #028 - A chance to be great

Back in January, I wrote about how a succession of Boston Celtics coaches have handled pressure.

The city has notoriously expectant sports fans, and it had been 16 years since its last NBA championship.

For second-year head coach Joe Mazzulla, the key to surviving that stifling environment was “surrendering” to the result while giving it everything you can.

You probably know by now how that ended - with title #18 after a 4-1 dismissal of the Dallas Mavericks.

So what new lessons can coaches take from Mazzulla, who at 35 years old was the youngest coach to win the NBA since 1969?

Let’s dive in:

Pressure really is a privilege

The last Celtics coach to bag a championship, Doc Rivers, famously shone a spotlight on a blank wall in their practice facility where the championship banner would go.

His mantra was “pressure is a privilege”, and he wanted the 2008 crew to lean into those high expectations.

You can hear echoes of this in Mazzulla’s post-game quotes:

“You get very few chances in life to be great, and you get very few chances in life to carry on the ownership and the responsibility of what these banners are, and all the great people, all the great players that came here,” Mazzulla said.

“When you have few chances in life, you just have to take the bull by the horns and you’ve got to just own it. And our guys owned it.”

You could argue that comes from a mindset of scarcity rather than abundance, especially as a man in the early days of his head coaching career.

But Mazzulla didn’t want to miss the chance and reminded us of the importance of staying in the here and now.

The players make the coach

World Cup-winning Australian rugby coach Eddie Jones was once asked in front of a room full of reporters what makes a great coach.

His response left no room for misinterpretation: “Great f**king players, mate.”

Similarly, Mazzulla’s quote above strove to give credit to the Celtics players who executed his gameplan on the court, something he had already nodded to earlier in the series.

“The thing you just can’t take for granted in the game today is a coach’s greatest gift is a group of guys that want to be coached, want to be led, that also empower themselves,” Mazzulla said.

“[I] appreciate the fact that we have an environment where learning and coaching is important, and getting better and developing is important.

“You can’t be a good coach if your players don’t let you.”

Mazzulla is determined to deflect praise in private too.

“When Joe won coach of the month, I was like, ‘Hey, congratulations,’” explained Celtics guard Derrick White.

“And he just looked at me and said, ‘Nobody cares.’”

Do anything to get an edge

Behind all this is a detail-oriented, unorthodox coach who seeks one-percenters everywhere he goes.

And the minutiae that goes into his simulation of pressurized moments at practice is a regular curiosity for his players.

“It starts in practice with them championship stations that Joe loves to do,” Derrick White recalled. “It starts there and then just continue to trust one another.”

Mazzulla thinks you can’t take little wins for granted.

“Sometimes it’s as small as getting the ball inbounds. But just try to pick little things, that we see on a nightly basis that can impact winning and can affect losing.”

Jrue Holiday reckons Mazzulla brings “a spark and some weird energy” along the way.

A metaphor about even the strongest sandcastles being washed away and needing to be rebuilt was “a little cheesy”, according to Jayson Tatum, but “something we bought into”.

That also extends to the coach blocking other players’ shots, as Mazzulla infamously attempted to do after calling a timeout:

“I saw a guy going in to get a shot and he hadn’t made one and I didn’t want him to feel good about himself going to the bench,” Mazzulla explained.

“That’s the bench rule… If I’m going to ask the guys to contest, staff’s going to do the same thing.”

“We can laugh about it. But I think you have small moments in your organization to set the temperature of what you want to be about.

“We did that last year and thinking back that’s an important thing that mindset that we try to bring. That we’re going to bring it every day. That we want our opponents to constantly be uncomfortable. We don’t want to give them an edge at any point.”

Coaching is an obsession - so obsess over it together

Mazzulla has struck up a cozy relationship with Pep Guardiola, the massively successful coach of English Premier League soccer giants Manchester City.

The Celtics boss visited Manchester back in February, while Guardiola was courtside in Boston for Game 1 of the finals.

“He’s a great coach and person,” Mazzulla said.

“Just humility, joy, work ethic, intensity that he brings. And, you know, we’ve grown to have a great relationship.

“So, I’m very grateful for him, and I’d like to think that we make each other better.”

Both Mazzulla - whose old assistant had to peel him away from game film in the evenings and make him watch regular TV for an hour before bed - and Guardiola are notoriously obsessive coaches.

And Mazzulla sees value in the kindship of coaches going through the same things.

He has relationships with Boston’s other pro coaches: Red Sox manager Alex Cora, Bruins coach Jim Montgomery and new Patriots coach Jerod Mayo, an older friend.

“I think as you get into this, you start to realize… nobody can really relate to you other than people in those positions.

“So, you develop a bond with other coaches, and you know what they are going through, what the challenges are and the opportunities and the situation you’re in.

“I think it’s really important that we all stick together.”