Joe Mazzulla went through growing pains, expectedly, as a first-year head coach with the Celtics this season. He certainly made mistakes in the playoffs. But given the challenging circumstances of his promotion, suddenly thrown into the job days before training camp after the suspension of Ime Udoka, the Celtics were happy with the job he did.
Though the Celtics failed in their goal of winning a championship, they view Mazzulla as the man for the job going forward. Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens, not surprisingly, confirmed Thursday that Mazzulla will remain the head coach.
“I think when you consider the position he was thrust into and the overall accomplishments of the group, I thought he did a really good job,” Stevens said. “When you look at it in the big picture and having a team that was second in offense, second in defense, won 57 games and (had) a chance to go to the NBA Finals on your home court, there’s a lot of direction and organization that goes into that. I thought that he did a good job.”
The Celtics have remained confident in Mazzulla since September, when they put him into an almost impossible task in getting the Celtics ready for training camp with nearly no time, a job Stevens – who was once an NBA coach who needed an entire summer of planning – said was Thursday was “remarkable.” Mazzulla gave the Celtics enough confidence to give him a contract extension in February before he ever coached a playoff game.
The playoffs were certainly a challenge for Mazzulla, who admitted costly mistakes along the way. Outsiders called for his job, and the noise was loud after the Celtics fell into a deep 0-3 series hole in the Eastern Conference Finals. But in helping the C’s respond to force a Game 7, he showed many of the qualities that made the Celtics comfortable with him throughout a mostly successful season.
“Everybody’s going to overreact to the best players and coaches after every game,” Stevens said. “That’s always the way it is. We know that going in so we have to be able to judge things on the whole. And he’s a terrific leader. He’ll only get better at anything that he can learn from this year because he’s constantly trying to learn. And he’s accountable. Those leadership qualities are hard to find. And I know they’re easy to talk about, but when you can show all those through the expectations and the microscope that he was under, that’s hard to do.
“And so, yeah, was he perfect? Would he like to have some moments back? Every coach would. Even the coaches nobody talks about would. We all that have coached know how hard that is.”
While Mazzulla was imperfect, Stevens recognized that they need to continue to support him moving forward. The Celtics virtually lost three coaches from their staff this season. Udoka was dismissed. Will Hardy departed before the season to be the head coach of the Jazz. In March, top assistant Damon Stoudamire – who Mazzulla relied heavily on as a rookie – suddenly left to become Georgia Tech’s head coach.
All three were incredibly valuable to the Celtics’ operation last season, and none were replaced. Stevens said he tried to add to the staff before the season and when Stoudamire left, but it was difficult. The Celtics moved forward with Ben Sullivan, Aaron Miles, Tony Dobbins and DJ MacLeay as Mazzulla’s assistants.
“Those timings are tough for people to up and move or up and join a new team that they don’t know anything about or don’t know,” Stevens said of trying to bring in an assistant before the season and during. “But that was just to be supplemental, because we believed in the people that were here.”
Stevens said the Celtics will add at least one assistant who has significant NBA experience to the staff this summer. One candidate could be Stephen Silas, who was seen at the Auerbach Center the day after he was fired as the Rockets’ head coach in April. They could add more to the staff if any other assistants leave. Sullivan and Miles were part of Udoka’s staff and could potentially follow him to Houston. Either way, Stevens said Mazzulla will lead the charge on that front.
“We’ll see how everything shakes itself out with what the staff looks like,” Stevens said. “But we’ll at least have one addition that we’ll make now that we have a summer to make it, and then we’ll go from there.”
Stevens didn’t want to cast any blame to Mazzulla about how this season went, which was certainly below their expectations ultimately. Instead of hosting Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday, the Celtics were hosting an end-of-season press conference sooner than they hoped. But Stevens wasn’t discouraged. He was encouraged by how the season went given the difficult circumstances to start the season, but recognized the need to get better this summer.
“Outside of our walls, we can do the dissecting of whose fault things are,” Stevens said. “Inside of our walls, it’s we have 60 people in basketball operations and we’ve all gotta do the best we can to get the results we want. And we all share it when it goes our way and we share it when it doesn’t go our way. And that’s gotta start with all of us. We have to all look at it that way. And I’m appreciative of our coaches being that way. I admire our players being that way.
“It is not easy to get up there and be accountable and to take ownership and know that all through it you accomplished a lot to get to the point where we were. So I have a great deal of admiration for their willingness to do that. And I think it speaks to the quality of character we have in here. We just have to be a little bit better.”
