Throughout his first season in green, Jrue Holiday couldn’t stop marveling at how much his new head coach Joe Mazzulla seemed to revel in uncomfortable situations.
Mazzulla seemed to go out of his way to put both himself, and his players, in tense situations. And it took time to realize there was always an unconventional method to his madness.
“Of anybody that I've known, [Mazzulla has] embraced adversity, I think, the most,” said Holiday. “It’s kind of to the point where it's kind of scary. I feel like he loves it. He loves it because he knows that it's gonna mold us and it's gonna help us grow.
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"I think a lot of people, even myself, it's hard to put yourself in a challenging or compromising position. And I feel like he does it. I feel like he does it for himself, he does it for us. Especially knowing the type of talent that we had last year. Him doing his best to put us in compromising situations so that, when we get to that last game, Game 4, Game 5 of a series, or Game 5 [of the Finals], a championship game, we'll fight through it and be able to win.”
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The Celtics are back in Indiana on Wednesday night for the first time since ripping the Pacers' heart out multiple times with impossibly crisp late-game play that fueled a more-difficult-than-it-looked sweep of Indiana in the 2024 Eastern Conference Finals.
It was Holiday who produced a game-sealing steal in Boston’s feverish rally to win Game 3 in Indiana. Jaylen Brown’s heroics throughout the series helped him earn ECF MVP honors.
A big question surrounding the Celtics entering the playoffs was whether they could consistently rise to the challenge in crunch-time situations. Boston’s regular-season clutch numbers were good, but the eye test suggested the team didn’t always thrive in those situations. Those numbers seemed to be juiced by some late-game lapses that sometimes made the score more uncomfortable than it needed to be.
But that was, at least occasionally, just part of Mazzulla’s madness.
In the playoffs, the Celtics were at their very best when things were at their most uncomfortable, especially against the Pacers. And Holiday is certain that it was a direct result of the way Mazzula prepped his team for those situations.
"I think he's always kept it real with us, where obviously we have a lot of talent. And people tell us that we have a lot of talent. But he tells us that we suck,” said Holiday. "He tells us that you're not as good as you think you are. And that just kind of balances you out and keeps you even. So, yeah, thanks Joe.”
Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens jokes that Mazzulla has an uncanny ability to steer his team towards an end goal even if the path there is often unconventional.
But whether it was making his team play without the benefit of timeouts, or repeatedly putting them in must-have situations during practice sessions, Mazzulla made sure the Celtics would ready to differentiate themselves in the most tense moments.
“There's nothing that we did [in the postseason] that we didn't know we were going to do going in,” said Derrick White, who hit the game-winning 3-pointer in the clinching Game 4 against the Pacers. “We'd make it clear, we'd break it down. Like, ‘Oh, we're doing this,' or, 'We’re up six, we’re going to foul.’
"Like, it wasn't like a surprise to anybody because we had been breaking it down. We've been talking about it all year. It’ll just be a random practice day and [Mazzulla will] break down some little end-of-game thing that might be crazy to someone else. But it’s going to win us a game.
"He's always had us prepared and he's always open to communication so we know what's going on. So, it's probably crazy to the outside world. But, for us, it's not crazy. It's comfortable. And especially by the end of the year, like it's second nature at that point.”
Once you win a title, nothing is crazy. And the Celtics proved last season that it’s nearly impossible to make them uncomfortable. Or at least more uncomfortable than their coach has already made them.