Boston Celtics
“At the end of the day we all battle with pride in some capacity and learning how to navigate that … we’re all just looking to just be better.”
Joe Mazzulla has been praised all season for keeping the Celtics competitive without Jayson Tatum. Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
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Joe Mazzulla has won nearly three-quarters (72.6 percent) of the regular-season games he has coached with the Celtics.
He has had the benefit of working an extremely talented roster and staff throughout his time here in Boston, and he isn’t shy about directing the praise he gets for the team’s success towards them.
When he was asked about his NBA Coach of the Year award candidacy a few weeks ago, Mazzulla called the award stupid said he hoped that no one would ask him about it again.
On Saturday, he was asked about it again. But this time, he was asked when he decided to start answering such questions the way that he did.
“I think being a Division I basketball player, you grow up with this sense of entitlement as if the whole world revolves around you,” Mazzulla said. “I had to — inherently — if I wanted to be a better husband, better father, better coach, I had to get rid of that type of entitlement.”
“I would say going through life as a student-athlete, you kind of think it’s all about you and it’s not,” Mazzulla said. “I had to surrender to that. There’s something way bigger than me in sports, the world, and life, so that’s important.”
He made those comments about the award while the Celtics were putting the finishing touches of an unexpectedly competitive season.
At the beginning of the year, ESPN Bet set the over/under for the Celtics’ win total at 40.5. They won 56 games, locking up the No. 2 seed for the second straight postseason and finishing one win shy of the 57 games the Celtics won in Mazzulla’s first season. They did it without Jayson Tatum for most of the year while he recovered from a ruptured Achilles’ tendon.
They also did it with a young team. Derrick White is the only one amongst the Celtics’ top-8 rotation players over age 30. Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Payton Pritchard, and Sam Hauser are all either 28 or 29 years old.
They’ve gotten a boost from developing young players. Neemias Queta has become a legitimate starting center. They’ve gotten contributions from Baylor Scheierman, Hugo Gonzalez, and Jordan Walsh.
These developments have put Mazzulla into serious consideration for the Coach of the Year award. Detroit’s JB Bickerstaff is also a contender, having taken Detroit from the league’s worst record two years ago to the top seed in the Eastern Conference.
According to BetMGM, Mazzulla closed the regular-season as the favorite to win. Bickerstaff had a long stretch as the favorite.
Sixteen years ago, Mazzulla helped West Virginia reach the Final Four in the NCAA tournament as a player. Now he’s coaching the Celtics in the playoffs for the fourth straight year.
There’s more to the story, he said, about the process caused his mind-set shift when it comes awards and credit. But, he explained his reasoning for why he operates that way.
“That’s a deeper conversation,” Mazzulla said when asked about the process. “At the end of the day we all battle with pride in some capacity and learning how to navigate that … we’re all just looking to just be better.”
Khari A. Thompson
Khari Thompson covers professional sports for Boston.com. Before joining the team in 2022, Khari covered college football for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Miss.
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