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For the first time in over a year, the Boston Celtics do not seem indestructible. The C's lost their second straight game on Christmas when their spirited rally against the Philadelphia 76ers fell short, and it continued a recent trend of poor shooting and lackluster defense. While the players have to go out and deliver, fingers are beginning to get pointed at head coach Joe Mazzulla.
Boston's leader from the bench has had one of the most strange coaching stints in NBA history. He was thrown into the fire from out of nowhere in the 2022-23 campaign when the team fired Ime Udoka right before the start of the season. There's a chance he would have gotten fired had the C's not been able to rally from a 3-0 deficit in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Miami Heat to force a Game 7, and that worked out alright since the team ended up winning the 2024 NBA Finals.
The Celtics have remained arguably the top team in the NBA this season, with Mazzulla garnering attention for his incredibly aggressive three-point game plan that has Boston shooting the most threes per game of any team in league history. But after a hot start, things aren't clicking, and with Mazzulla digging his feet in the ground and refusing to make changes, he's beginning to hurt the C's more than he's helping them.
Joe Mazzulla, Celtics need to become more adaptable
With a 22-8 record, Boston still has the third best record in the league behind the Cleveland Cavaliers and Oklahoma City Thunder, but the optics surrounding them currently aren't great. They have now lost three of their last four games, and they have just a 6-5 record in the month of December. Simply put, they have not looked great.
The Celtics style of basketball is simple. Take and make more threes than their opponent, and play airtight defense on the other end of the floor. When it works, Boston is nearly unbeatable. But when it doesn't flaws begin to pop up, and with the rest of the league having over a year to figure out how to beat this version of the Celtics, the team is struggling to adapt.
Everybody knows that Boston wants to shoot threes. They are averaging a mind-boggling 50.4 three-point attempts per game, which is six more than the next closest team, the Chicago Bulls. The problem is that they are hitting just 36.5% of their threes. Aside from Payton Pritchard, pretty much everyone on the Celtics is shooting worse from behind the arc than they were last year.
This is a problem for a handful of reasons. It's one thing if Boston is hitting threes, but when they aren't, they are making their opponents' lives far too easy. Let's start with the obvious; the Celtics are taking threes that they simply should not be taking. That's resulted in pretty much everyone's shooting percentages from behind the arc to fall, and while they are making lots of threes, they are passing up points by forcing low-percentage shots.
Boston's three best players in Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Kristaps Porzingis are lethal interior scorers, but their skills at the rim are being put on the backburner for more three-point shots. Tatum's three-point shooting has been virtually identical to last season, but both Brown and Porzingis are shooting just over 32% on their threes right now. That's not nearly good enough considering the volume of threes this team is taking.
Take the team's loss to Philadelphia as an example. Joel Embiid sat on the bench for more than half of the fourth quarter, which should have opened things up in the paint for Boston, but Mazzulla stood pat. The C's refused to attempt to get to the rim against a small Sixers lineup, and it resulted in them getting burned on the other end as Philly frequently ran out in transition. Ironically enough, Boston's last-minute rally was predicated on getting to the paint, and had they done this earlier, they probably would have won.
That brings us to another issue, which is defense. Injuries have not helped, but Boston has some weaknesses that are being picked apart on a nightly basis. The team struggles to stick with speedy guards like Tyrese Maxey (33 points, 12 assists), especially in transition. That's an issue because the Celtics are frequently forced to defend in half-court sets when they aren't hitting their avalanche of threes, which makes their task more difficult.
You can make an argument that Boston simply needs to play the way Mazzulla wants them to, but it's not that easy. The NBA is a read-and-react league. Teams are figuring out that they can play higher up on the Celtics at the perimeter without paying much of a price because they know they are going to shoot threes no matter what. And when they force misses, Boston's defense, for as good as it may be, is not capable of successfully defending in transition as much as they are forcing themselves to.
There will be nights when the threes are falling and all is well, but when they aren't, it's on Mazzulla to adapt and tailor a game plan that's catered towards what the other team is throwing at them. All this is a problem, but perhaps the most concerning aspect is that Mazzulla doesn't seem worried at all, saying he's not looking at the numbers and that he's not upset with the team's poor play.
This is who Mazzulla is, and while Boston has built up enough goodwill for fans to give them time to figure things out, Mazzulla's coaching has come across as borderline lazy this year, which isn't good. The Celtics are playing like a team that feels they have nothing left to prove after winning the Finals last year. The urgency needs to be ratcheted up a notch, though, and it starts with Mazzulla. Here's hoping this loss to Philly was the slap in the face that he and the rest of the team needed in order to get their act together.
