BRIGHTON -- Joe Mazzulla isn’t interested in pretending basketball stays still for long. Neither, apparently, is the way he wants the Celtics to play.
A year ago, Boston leaned into a much messier defensive identity. The goal was to create more chaos, swarm the ball, force turnovers, and get away from the old standstill, one-on-one approach the team had relied on in previous seasons. For a while, it was exactly the kind of change that gets players and fans buzzing.
Then the Celtics pulled back from it.
That shift rubbed some people the wrong way, with criticism landing on Mazzulla and the staff for supposedly drifting back to old habits. But the reality, as Mazzulla described it Monday morning before practice, is more fluid than that.
Basketball philosophies are not carved in stone. They bend when the team bends.
“Both. I think last year is a perfect example of that,” Mazzulla said.
“We went in with a defensive system, thinking that was good, and we were the worst rebounding team in the history of basketball, and so we had to change. And then we became the best team.
So, there's nothing fixed. I mean, you have some certain stuff that you want to get to, but we could say we know our team, but I don't know our team.
That's not a bad thing.
"Your team is going to change, and you have to be aware of those changes and build your system around what your team looks like. And so, you have a good idea of that, but guys grow, guys get better, the league changes, and through 10, 15, 20 games, you may see something in your team that you didn't see today, and you just have to be willing to get to that as fast as you can."
That point lands with extra force because the Celtics have already hit a familiar early-season issue. Through their first 20 games, defensive rebounding had become a problem, with Boston grabbing just 66.3% of its defensive rebound chances. If that rate had held all season, it would have been the worst defensive rebounding percentage since 1998.
That’s the kind of number that pushes a coach to reassess, and Mazzulla made clear he sees that as part of the job. Teams change.
Players change. The league changes.
The best version of a system is the one that matches the roster in front of you, not the one that looked perfect on paper months earlier.
It’s the same broader logic that has shaped other teams, from the Mike Budenholzer Milwaukee Bucks trying to shut off rim attempts and ending up giving up plenty of 3-pointers, to the Mike D'Antoni Phoenix Suns looking to play faster than ever before. Different philosophies, different tradeoffs. The point is never that a team has a fixed answer forever.
For Mazzulla, the answer is the willingness to keep adjusting before the season forces your hand.
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