CHARLESTON -- Training camp can make every roster look promising. Nobody’s been benched yet, nobody’s been blamed in the media, and nobody has hit the kind of stretch that forces a team to show what it really is.
That was Joe Mazzulla’s point earlier this week: the early days of camp can flatter everybody. The Celtics can feel good, and so can the other 29 teams. But that mood only lasts until the season starts throwing punches.
“Every team in the league is the most together team right now because we haven't traveled, no one's gotten benched, no one's been on a losing streak, no one's gotten blamed in the media, no one's had to go stand in the corner for 10 minutes and not get the ball,” Mazzulla said earlier in the week. “So you learn those things as the season goes on, and you learn how to work through those things together.
And you can't simulate those. It just comes with time.
“And so, right now I would say all 30 teams feel great about themselves, and we got to wait till adversity hits. And adversity is even a strong word.
I mean, there's nothing really adverse about playing in the NBA. But we got to wait till stuff doesn't go your way, and then, we got to figure out who we are and how we're going to be at our best.”
That’s the real challenge in camp: not proving you’re good, but building habits that still matter when things get messy. The Celtics are using this stretch to get familiar with one another again - old faces, new faces, and the kinds of on-court ideas that can only be stress-tested once the games count.
“There isn't an objective that you just check it off the list and never go back to it,” Mazzulla said on Tuesday morning in Charleston. “You're trying to build certain things in training camp that you can then pull from and go back to in those moments, and then, like I kind of said in that quote, there's always things that come up over the course of the season that are either going to bring you closer as a team or bring you further apart as a team, and so you just got to be ready to handle those things as a team and work on those throughout the season.”
The Celtics have long leaned into that idea of making practice feel a little less comfortable. In previous camps, they’ve pumped crowd noise through the building, recreated the sound of TD Garden, and even played gunfire over the loudspeakers. The goal is obvious: create pressure before the pressure is real.
Mazzulla said that’s still part of the process, even if no drill can truly match what’s waiting months down the line.
“I think you try to. I think you try to create moments of stress throughout training camp,” Mazzulla said.
“Whether it's in the scrimmaging, whether it's in certain situations. We definitely try to actively work on those beforehand, but at the same time, you can't simulate those things four or five months from now.”
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