What did Joe Mazzulla say about the Boston Celtics’ 18th NBA title win?

Trusting players and knowing when to step back and let the team do what they do is how Joe Mazzulla described his formula for success as he watched his Boston Celtics side clinch the NBA title in front of a capacity home crowd on Monday night. It was the C’s 18th title - and Mazzulla’s first, almost five years to the day when he was brought in as Brad Stevens’ assistant. Before taking the reins as interim head coach in September 2022, Mazzulla’s only top level coaching experience was a couple of seasons with Fairmont State in the NCAA Division II.

Mazzulla praises players for “setting the tone” in title win

The only credit Mazzulla would give himself in guiding his team to the NBA title was being able to “stand out of the way”. He played down his involvement after Monday’s win: “I think when you have great players and you have guys that have been in the league for 17 years, guys who have been to the finals, that have been coached by other great coaches and been a part of other systems, you have Jrue and all of these players with other experience, it’s nothing more than just facilitating. You have to allow the guys to set the temperature of the organization on a daily basis and then you just have to facilitate and fill in the gaps from time to time, depending on where people are at.

“If your team doesn’t set the tone, if they don’t set the temperature of the building every day, it doesn’t really matter who’s coaching because you’re not going to be able to get things to where they need to get to. We’re able to work together but you’ve got to have the guys to do it and it’s a credit to them,” he added.

Boston had the chance to wrap up the series on Friday - had they managed to do so, it would have been just the 10th time that the finals would have been won within the first four games (curiously, the Celtics were the first to achieve the feat, beating Minneapolis Lakers 0-4 in 1959). But Mazzulla is keen to point out that while his team won this series 4-1, the reality is that the contest against Dallas, along with all of the games played during this year’s playoffs, were decided by small details.

The tiny details between winning and losing

“I think the biggest thing you learn is that a lot of teams are closer to winning than they realize,” the coach explained. “You just have to focus on the minor details, the small things that go into winning. What separates winning and losing, it’s a very small margin. And between the players we have, their character, their buy-in, their approach to the game and the ability to win those margins - the separation between winning and losing is very, very close.

“Listen, you take a look at last year, being down 3-0 down but we were only really down 15 or 20 possessions and in a playoff game, yes you’re down 1-0 but you could just lose one quarter and be down 1-0, so it was, okay, what goes into winning a game? Being down 3-0, I was thinking, where are the possessions that we lost, that would have given us a better chance to win in those situations. And you focus on those things - starting quarters, end of quarters... we were one of the better teams in the league last year - but only when we shot the ball well. We had to go back and work on our offensive rebounding percentage, which helped our transition defense.

“So just building connections into the game and doing all the little things that can impact those things and being down 3-0 was one of the ultimate gifts that we’ve been able to have because it gave great perspective of, it was really just about 15-20 possessions that we had to clean up. Can we make those things a mindset? And can we do it together?”

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