In seriousness Joe deserves a lot of credit in papering over the Celtics flaws during the regular season, largely because he got all the players to buy in, particularly the bench and the lesser names, even if some of them sat for long stretches. Players like Q, Walsh, Hugo, Garza, Simons, Baylor and Harper were all instrumental in the team significantly exceeding expectations during the regular season.
Unfortunately the playoffs, being a 7 game series and more about matchups, have a way of unmasking weaknesses. And our weaknesses were unmasked by a team that eventually matched up well against us - we had nobody to defend Embiid, who was at 70%, all our centers got into foul trouble against him. And we had nobody to defend Maxey at the point of attack. And they went away from the strategy they had employed throughout the regular season, which was to take less 3s and more midrange and paint shots, back to one where they took a lot more perimeter shots (and to make it worse they missed them more often than their average).
(click to enlarge)
Fans tend to want to assign a scapegoat, a person they can focus their blame on, but I think Brad will know as well as anyone that blowing a 3-1 lead is rarely due to one person - in our case it was probably a combination of a) missed shots; b) one dimensional play that became predictable and easy to defend; and c) not having the talent necessary to make effective changes. And that's really on all of them - but Joe has command responsibility, he is tasked with finding a way to change the trajectory of games when the team isn't shooting well. It's not good enough to say "make miss league" or "we had the right process but the execution was off" (like Atkinson said). He's a process driven person but this is ultimately a results business and you have to get results.
But I'm probably more forgiving of him than others because half the team was shipped out, we weren't expecting to be as good as we were in the regular season, finishing 2nd seed and the return of Tatum (which in itself brought additional integration challenges) raised expectations and they weren't met. But I don't think he is as dogmatic as people think, I think it's more a function of the players he has. Look at Jaylen, he took the 5th most middrange shots in the league this season and his 3FGA was considerably down on last year. Joe gave him the green light to shoot from the midrange as much as he wanted. If Joe had an Embiid or some other post player (like we had KP in 2024) the team would be running more post actions. I think he will learn and adapt to the team he is given.
Topic: Joe Mazzula Wins Coach Of The Year (Read 1240 times)