I would take anyone over incompetent Joe Mazzulla.
I am almost dreading the season because I cannot see the Celts winning any titles with him as head coach.
In the end, I blame Brad for wasting this talent. How he could justify keeping Joe on is beyond me.
This is a rather common response in regards to JM on this forum, and I find it kind of humorous.
Hard to argue that Brad wasn’t at the very least a good (if not great or even elite) coach. He brought in Ime, which many believe he too was a very good coach.
Then there is Joe. Everyone dismisses him but Brad believes in him. Forget that he was a rookie head coach handed a team after camp opened, and lost important assistants for the playoff run. Yet Brad, who has proven to know what he’s doing (both on the sidelines and in the front office) doubled down on him this summer.
Joe can and will get better.
My stance is that Joe probably shouldn't have been our choice back when we hired him. We had a team ready to win now, and it struck me as a strange choice to select an "upside" coach who may not find his stride for two or three years - if at all - rather than an experienced coach who could hit the ground running. Would have taken Quin Snyder in an instant, for example.
Having said that, riding the coaching carousel again this soon would just undermine our reputation and anger current players. Nobody wants four coaches in as many years. As long as Mazzulla is our guy, he deserves a real chance with a real support staff, and that's what he has now. So I hope he makes the most of the opportunity, because this team appears to have everything it needs otherwise.
The problem with a Quin Snyder was that, when the Mazzulla decision was made, Udoka was suspended and not fired. You weren’t going to get Snyder, Vogel, or any other coach of that ilk for an interim role.
When the Celtics decided to suspend, rather than fire, Udoka in September, the only options were internal. Maybe it should have been Stoudamire, maybe Joe, maybe someone else, but there were very limited options. And as Stevens knows a heck of a lot more about coaching than I do, I’m going to assume he made the right call long term. I do think Mazzulla wasn’t fully prepared to be a head coach last year, but he was hired days before training camp started, so how could he have been otherwise? I’m looking forward to how his coaching has evolved in his second season, with a full summer to prepare, and with a staff that he has chosen and have chosen to work with him. He was put in an impossible situation last fall, and I think he at least treaded water.
