The Celtics’ orca-loving Joe Mazzulla is an NBA oddball. He’s also a masterful coach | Boston Celtics

Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla is a very strange man. He is also a very good coach.

Take, for example, a story told by Celtics guard Derrick White in an interview last November. According to White, the first sound made during a Celtics practice was not a whistle.

It was gunshots.

“[Mazzulla is] like: “Play some music!” “…and then it’s just machine guns going off…you’re in a war zone,” White said. He was laughing – but not really.

The 37-year-old coach marked the sweat session with a death noise, missing balls during 10 straight minutes of zigzags and recoveries all over the court. He wanted the players’ lungs to burn. He wanted them to taste vomit.

Mazzulla believes – and he believes a lot of things – that repetition under stress rewires your brain. Psychologists have spent decades studying how stimuli associated with intensity create recall that bypasses deliberation. The military have industrialized it: conditioning, desensitization, immersion. The underlying principle is simpler and more universal: the brain learns faster when it is overwhelmed. Adapt or die.

There is something disturbing about all this. Basketball borrows from the logic of war. Every coach will give platitudes about stress inoculation. Mazzulla puts sensory overload into practice. The goal is the same: reduce decision-making to instinct.

Mazzulla’s version of controlled chaos is the sound of gunfire, hence the training session. For what? So when weeks later, in the fourth quarter, a goalie brings the ball all over the court, the crowd is loud and the game is close, any player dressed in green and white can turn into a Manchurian candidate: the synapses click into place to deliver the deadly shot into the hoop.

Many things are strange. And a lot of what Mazzulla says is strange. He doesn’t really talk like other NBA coaches. His press conferences can resemble philosophy seminars more than strategy seminars. Perhaps Mazzulla’s deadpan delivery is Andy Kaufman performance art: part jokes, part koans, delivered with a straight face. Players learned to stop trying to decode everything and just absorb the tone.

He talked about wanting a wolf to guard his house, never sitting with his back to the door at restaurants in case someone sneaks up on him, and avoiding revolving doors because “if one of them gets stuck, then you’re just an easy target.” He wants his players to study the movements of orcas and hyenas to improve their games.

The fact is that, whether because of his quirks or in spite of them, Mazzulla is a very effective trainer. He’s already led the Celtics to a championship and is deserving of Coach of the Year honors after leading the injury-riddled Celtics to the second seed in the East this season while holding the second-best offensive rating, fourth-best defensive rating and third-best net rating.

It’s worth remembering that Boston was supposed to have a year off after Jayson Tatum was knocked out of the playoffs due to an Achilles injury. Starters Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis were both traded. Bench bigs Al Horford and Luke Kornet left in free agency, a very high cost of survival under the new collective bargaining agreement.

Most teams would have reset. But Mazzulla walked into the lab and changed the Celtics’ DNA. He organized the offense around spacing, timing and reads, building a system that could work until Tatum returned. And defensively, he cut him to the bone: just his nerves raw and frayed by constant ball pressure. This type of scalable infrastructure helps players reach their ceiling without your best player.

As the team changed, so did Mazzulla. It would have been easy to ask Jaylen Brown to be Tatum. Instead, he uses each player according to his strength.

This is why Ron Harper Jr, Baylor Scheierman, Hugo González and Luka Garza were able to step in and progress. Even Brown should rebound, run, defend and play with the same energy and physicality the Celtics demand of everyone.

What is behind the new philosophy? This summer, Mazzulla traveled to France, where he met Guillaume Vizade, another basketball eccentric and head coach at Le Mans. Two coaches from different systems attempted to crack the code to creating advantages before a defense could take hold.

Vizade describes the meeting as a think tank: “Our shared ideas about coming into attack through play, amplifying advantages and creating chaos in opposing defenses connected very quickly during these discussions. I felt both lucky and proud to be able to present some of our methods and actions, and in return, I received even more by interacting with Joe and his disruptive approach.”

Vizade’s teams don’t just run; they vibrate. Hardwired into a single hive mind. Like mushrooms. This is how Boston plays now. When the first offensive option is cut off, the offense doesn’t flinch. This restarts a sequence of cuts and relocations which widen score gaps.

Mazzulla’s COTY case also rests on the extent to which he changed Boston defensively. Last season, the Celtics could let their opponents play one-on-one, live contested shots without fouling. This year, they are attacking their opponents all over the field and putting pressure on the ball.

When one defender takes a risk, another fills the space. If someone is beaten, the next one takes turns. If this pass is successful, another fence occurs behind it. This is why the Celtics’ corner help blocks have become a staple. Boston runs so well that it forces its opponents to make this extra pass. Mazzulla did all this without a great rim protector.

The clearest example of Mazzulla’s approach came in the 2024 Finals, when Dallas kept its big men near the rim, helping weakside shooters invade the paint. At first it worked. Boston found itself in traffic and ended up punting the ball late.

Mazzulla’s adjustment was to use that help against Dallas. Boston began pulling the help defender to the ball, often using a guard like Holiday to drag the Mavericks big man up the court. As soon as the help came, they swung the ball to the other side before the defense could recover.

From there, the options were obvious: a layup, a post-up or an open corner three. What looked like a simple ball movement was actually a clever way to divide the Dallas defense, turning it against itself. Mad scientist level plots.

Speaking about last year’s disappointing second-round playoff exit, he said: “Every season exposes you to yourself…the third year you get a taste of what it’s like to lose.”

That’s how Mazzulla rolls. He shows his players films of orcas and hyenas, predators that never attack at the same time. Instead, they circle, moving around, waiting for the right moment before closing in and snapping the neck of their prey. Boston’s offense works the same way. The ball moves from side to side until the defense finally gives up a good shot.

Other media outlets have detailed that being a Celtic means embracing the Joe Mazzulla experience. We’re talking about a guy who walks around the facility barefoot while giving instructions in a glacial, hyper-focused monotone. He manages the Celtics like a man who knows he’s in the Matrix and wants his team to twist the simulation to his advantage.

The league is in good hands. JB Bickerstaff sharpens the blade in Detroit, Mitch Johnson accelerated the transformation of the Spurs and Mike Brown restores Eden in the Garden. But Mazzulla raced far ahead of the field for COTY by retooling an exhausted competitor while remaining competitive. Mad.

This is what elite coaching looks like.

This is why Joe Mazzulla should win Coach of the Year.

Play music.