Inconsistency, poor effort and blown leads

[Celtic_Pride777]

I think if the Celtics don't win a championship, there will be a coaching change.

The team lacks discipline, which seems to have been a problem for all three mentioned coaches?

Are some of the Celtics still smarting over the puritanical treatment of the previous coach?
At least puritanical to some. You don't want to lose your coach like that if you're a player.

Just throwing stuff out. I have no answers. But I do think there will be a coaching change if things don't work out.
The present inexperienced coach was thrust into the job because there was no alternative in mid season.
There will be plenty of experienced unemployed coaches in the off season.
Doc Rivers for one.

If the Celtics lose in this round or in the Finals, I'd be SUPER surprised if the team fires Joe. They just signed him to an extension. Firing Mazzula makes them look bad and I doubt Brad and Wyc have the humility to acknowledge they've made a mistake.

Unfortunately, Joe will be with us for another season, and I'm not sure his bad habits will go away. 

Joe's not going anywhere. At least not for another season. Because we are championship or bust as fans we are holding him to a very high standard, which is to win a championship. But I don't think that Brad and Wyc see it that way. He was hired this year a week before training camp, parachuted into the top job for a team expected to win a championship under difficult circumstances, didn't have a chance to really put his mark on the team and having to learn how to be an NBA head coach and manage a staff and the players on the fly, and right now his team is in the ECF having finished with the second seed in the league. I think Brad and Wyc will take those things into account, as well as the fact that he's 34 and still has the capacity to learn from his mistakes. And they'll not pin it all on Joe, the players are going to take some stick too.

As fans we came close last year and we want to win a championship because we've only had one in 34 years so anything other than that will be considered a failure on Joe's part. The mistakes and bad things he does are magnified for us. All those "extentuating circumstances" for us are meaningless. But I think Brad and Wyc are looking on a longer term horizon than championship or bust. Now if he regresses next year and the year after, or there's evidence that he's lost the locker room, then he might be in some strife 

This is a well-reasoned post, but why bother giving an inexperienced coach time to learn and adjust when your main priority should be to compete for a title? I don't know how Brad and Wyc think, but for most NBA franchises that are contending for a title, there's something called a "championship window," which means you need to go all in while your top players are still in their primes. Each year is important. You never know how far you'll go into the playoffs. The path to the finals might be harder than the previous year. You never know who will be injured. And you can only keep key players on your roster for a limited time before they're traded or signed elsewhere. This is how most GMs and owners think. There shouldn't be any need to have a young coach who's on a learning curve. There are several, more experienced coaches with championship pedigree who'd gladly take on the job.

Mazzula will be here for at least another year and, hopefully, he proves his doubters wrong. But it'd be a shame if he fails and we've wasted another precious year where we should've won a title.

I can only guess that they saw something in him at the start of the season that the rest of us didn't (and don't). Brad probably sees a lot of himself in Joe, they seem to have a similar quantitative outlook on the game. I guess at that point the decision was to promote from within or go outside the organization and bring in an outsider that would put his own stamp on the team, culture, etc. I'm speculating, but maybe they thought that it would be an easier transition for the players to promote from within. I would imagine that most decent organizations do succession planning, and the fact that they let Will Hardy go but not Mazz, and told Utah they could pick one but not the other when Danny wanted both, suggests to me that one of those two were their succession plan. Maybe the opportunity would have been to get an experienced assistant coach, like a Vogel or a D'Antoni or someone, but maybe they feared that such a coach might end up undermining Joe's authority and have his eye on the top job. (That's just speculation on my part.)

Obviously now they have a whole season's worth of data points and certainly it's been an imperfect season for Joe. His flaws have been exposed, and though overall you could say that the team has met the minimum criteria for success (make the playoffs, finish in the second seed, make the ECF) the inconsistency in performance and the large delta between their ceiling and floor has not given any of the fans a level of comfort. In an ideal world we'd want them to be thrashing everyone by 20 which their talent level seems to indicate should be the case, but the reality has been very different.

The other question is, why make Joe permanent when they did and not wait till the end of the season? I would suspect, like you said, they were never going to fire Joe at the end of the season. The only scenario where I feel that would have been a possibility is if Joe had pulled an Ime and violated some team rule, or the team significantly regressed to the point where it was obvious there wasn't a connection between him and the players. Brad and Wyc don't strike me as knee jerk people with the benefit of hindsight. And obviously as you said there's the human aspect, you don't want to fire someone you just made permanent a few months earlier because then it looks like you made the wrong decision. You would want to give the guy a chance to prove you right. It sucks for us because we want a championship and we want it now, and nobody cares about all this stuff because any mistake Joe (and the team, which Joe is ultimately responsible for) makes is really magnified with so much on the line. Not defending what they did but I can understand why they made the decisions they did at the time, even if hindsight may have proven them wrong (so far).

But back to the main point of the thread, I think at season end, whether that comes with a championship or not, Joe's end of season review will bring up all these issues and how they can be addressed. And the bar for him will be a lot higher next season because Brad and Wyc will be looking to see if he does improve. Whether it's a player issue with the inconsistency and lack of a killer instinct, he is ultimately responsible for preparing them. He's going to be graded a little softer this season but not next season.

Okay. Fair enough. Use someone who's already familiar with the organization rather than hire an outsider. That can make the transition from Ime easier. But why give Joe a three-year extension before he's proven his worth in the postseason?

That I don't have a plausible explanation for, other than maybe the contract isn't fully guaranteed? The only reasons I could see them doing it to an untested guy is a) they are totally, totally sold on Joe and see him as their coach for the next 10+ years or b) it's a contract they can get out of without financial penalty.

It's not totally implausible to think that Joe can improve...he's only 34, at that age Spoelstra wasn't even a head coach yet, he was just an assistant with the Heat, while Pop wasn't even coaching in the NBA yet, he was an assistant at Kansas. Remember how much criticism Spoelstra got when LeBum made his announcement he was going to Miami, everyone was like "so this kid is going to coach the Miami Big Three?" And look at Spoelstra now. So maybe they think his long term trajectory is that he will grow as the Jays grow and that his presence here will keep the Jays here. The flip side is that if he's really bad, set in his ways, and doesn't improve and loses the locker room and the Jays, that extension is going to look pretty silly. And it also means that they would be expecting growing pains over the next few years, which just happen to be when the Jays are hitting their prime. That's not something we as fans are going to want to hear 

Everything you said is true. But the part in bold is my biggest concern. They're counting on him improving and learning, but it's rare for an NBA team (especially one contending for a title) to hand over a coaching job to someone with so little experience. Joe started as an assistant in 2019. Before that, he spent two years coaching Division II basketball. Most aspiring coaches have to prove their worth and rise in the ranks. It can take years before they're given their first opportunity. But for some reason, Mazzula jumped ahead. You really have to ask yourself, "What do Brad and Wyc see in Joe?"