On Tuesday, during a segment on the Boston sports radio program Zolak and Bertrand, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla was asked to ponder hypothetical revisions to the NBA rule book. “How would the game change,” host Marc Bertrand asked, “if the corner 3 was taken away, and the arc went to the sidelines?” Mazzulla’s response was eager and immediate, as if he’d been waiting a lifetime for this very question. Well—sort of.
“First of all,” Mazzulla responded. “Let’s entertain more important rules that would make the game better.” Dang, floor’s yours, Joe! “So there should be, like, a power play,” he declared, “where on a take foul, or a technical, you have to play five-on-four. For five seconds, or three passes.”
Wait, is that … hockey’s music? First basketball co-opted the “hockey assist,” and now this. Mazzulla got even more animated from there, endorsing a little on-court scuffling between players, as a treat. So here, to properly discuss this important crossover event between “grabbing the boards” and “two minutes for boarding” are The Ringer’s resident Coach Mazzulla aficionados, Katie Baker and Howard Beck.
Katie Baker: Howard! Let me start by saying how happy these comments made me. Sure, I have zero rooting interest in the Celtics, and if anything I feel mostly antagonism toward the franchise as a Knicks fan who’s married to a Masshole. Yet Joe Mazzulla is one of my favorite coaches in all of sports right now.
He’s been described as “a sicko” (complimentary!) and “psycho … in a good way!” by his own players. He’s been said to hyperfixate on interests ranging from jiu-jitsu to the major motion picture The Town. Last season, he coached the Celtics to a title while saying things like, “The closer you think you are to beating someone, the closer you are to getting your ass kicked.” And now this. He’s appealing to hockey fans? Who could ask for anything more?
This man’s absurdity-to-success ratio was already approaching a perfect 1.0. But enough about my bespoke statistics, Howard. Let me ask you: As a far more professional and insightful observer of the National Basketball Association than I can ever be, what do you make of Joe Mazzulla?
Howard Beck: I’m honestly not sure whether I should be bored, fascinated, or scared of him. Like, most of Mazzulla’s press-conference quotes are so bland, so anodyne, that he makes Brad Stevens sound like Bill Walton by comparison. But then out of the blue, he’ll compare himself to rottweilers (“They’re so misunderstood”) or feign indignance over a random sports cliché (“The word ‘defend’ is a very passive-aggressive term. You go back to the animal kingdom, some of the strongest animals don’t defend; they’re the most aggressive, and they attack the most”), and suddenly he’s got my attention. Most of the time he greets questions with that icy, thousand-yard stare, as if contemplating the 50 ways he’d like to unleash his misunderstood rottweiler on your nosy, dumb-question-asking ass.
Baker: OK, quick fact check. Per Mazzulla: “Basketball is one of the only sports that doesn’t have a power play.” True or false? And was I the only one who totally expected him to continue that sentence with some grindset bon mot like “That’s because OUR play … IS our power”?
Beck: So, fact check: false. To my knowledge, there’s no power play in baseball or volleyball or synchronized swimming. There is, however, a power play in Muggle Quidditch, per Wikipedia, so I’m sure that’s what Mazzulla had in mind. Definitely seems like a Harry Potter guy, right? I mean, the man’s a basketball wizard.
Baker: Big Ravenclaw Energy from Joe! (I also just had a really vivid mental image of him shapeshifting into a cat.) He did specifically mention that soccer is instituting power-play-esque “blue cards,” but I’m not clear on whether any top leagues have actually enacted such a change. Either way, I wasn’t surprised to see him bring up that sport. Sam Hauser once spoke of Mazzulla’s interdisciplinary approach to coaching: “He pulls things from, like, soccer teams,” Hauser said, “pulls things from killer whales and how they go about finding food and prey, things like that.”
At training camp this year, someone asked Mazzulla about that killer whale bit. “The animal kingdom is the most pure form of hierarchy and role definition that there is,” Mazzulla explained. “Everybody plays their role. If you step outside of it, you get killed.” Really makes you think! If you could assign Mazzulla to incorporate a topic of your choosing into his coaching of the Boston Celtics, what would it be?
Beck: Probably lobster rolls. Not because I think Mazzulla has any special insight into lobster rolls, necessarily. Just because I really love lobster rolls.
Baker: It would likely be a rich text: Joe’s a Rhode Island guy, which means he could go either way on the Connecticut-Maine divide. And you know he has an outrageous rationale either way.
Knowing that Mazzulla and Jayson Tatum were in the house for Game 7 of the first-round series between the Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs this spring, and in the spirit of this exchange, I’d assign the two a group project about a cultural history of the two Original Six NHL teams’ rivalry that touches on each of the following phrases/topics: “a wave of bitter resentment,” Phil Kessel, “it was 4-1,” and Mitch Marner. (Do we think Mazzulla could fix him?)
Beck: I should stipulate here that the entirety of my hockey knowledge comes from playing a zillion hours of Sega Genesis NHLPA Hockey ’93 with my pals Dan and Luther in the early ’90s. Every game ended like the scene in Swingers, right down to the gratuitous replays, dickish taunting, near fights and all of us eventually bemoaning the elimination of animated blood on the ice in the 1994 edition. (In fact, we firmly believe to this day that Jon Favreau secretly spied on us and used us as inspiration. Please don’t ask me to explain how or why this would have happened. We’re just sure he did.)
Baker: Oh, I’ll gladly get on that level. Is Joe Mazzulla even old enough to have made Gretzky’s head bleed on NHLPA ’93?! Has he ever found himself wondering what’s the basketball equivalent of The Whale beating mid-’90s Vancouver?! I digress …
Speaking of hockey, as I understand it, Mazzulla’s grand “power play” vision for the NBA is that in certain situations, like take fouls or technicals, the punishment should be that a guilty player has to go wait on the far side of the mid-court circle for a few moments, giving the other team a brief 5-on-4 advantage.
Have you heard a proposal like this before? What’s your initial reaction? Which old-head player would be most dismissive of its implementation, and why would it be Charles Oakley, the Brad Marchand of the ’90s Knicks?
Beck: I’ve been on the NBA beat for 27-plus years, and no, never heard anyone propose anything like this. The man is an innovator! If only he’d come along sooner. David Stern would have welcomed any means to penalize Rasheed Wallace for his nightly tirades in the early 2000s.
Baker: So many thought exercises here. Which other franchises would want to join Mazzulla’s power play coalition? Maybe teams with fragile stars, or teams whose coaches love cooking up oddball X’s and O’s? On the flip side, who would lead the league in Naughty Semicircle time? (And also, if you timed it just right, could you jailbreak the guy in the circle directly into a fast break? It’s too bad we couldn’t have seen the Warriors of the 2010s try.)
Beck: Now that I think about it, this would be a pretty effective way to tamp down on serial complainers like Draymond Green and Luka Doncic. No one enjoys watching players berate the refs. Also, think about the sponsorship possibilities! “And that’s a tech on Luka, who is now banished to the ‘No Flex Zone Naughty Semicircle,’ sponsored by Wingstop.”
But on the strategy side? Hoo boy, where to begin? I mean, opposing teams would definitely be baiting guys like Dillon Brooks and Anthony Edwards (15 techs each last season). Then again, there’s this: In the NBA, a 5-on-4 advantage is almost (almost) an automatic basket or shooting foul. Four can’t guard five. So I think the end result of the Mazzulla Power Play Sponsored by Powerade would be … fewer techs and tirades? Maybe? A man can dream …
Baker: In addition to his power play thoughts, Mazzulla shared another big idea on the radio on Tuesday: that NBA players ought to be able to smack one another around a little bit, For The Fans. Let’s do another fact check, shall we? Here’s what Mazzulla said: “The biggest thing that we [in the NBA] rob people of from an entertainment standpoint is you can’t fight anymore. We should just bring back fighting!” Howard, is that true or false?!
Beck: If the great David Stern were still with us, he would slap Mazzulla with a 10-game suspension just for saying this out loud. No, the NBA was not better with clotheslining, head-butting and bench-clearing brawls. I know he’s young, but has Joe heard of the Malice at the Palace? Or Kermit Washington literally breaking Rudy Tomjanovich’s face? The league has gone to great lengths to get the violence out of the game (and, you know, to not alienate the public). I know older fans sometimes get nostalgic for the grimier ’80s and ’90s, and for a time when players weren’t so outwardly chummy, but yeesh.
Baker: Even hockey has ostensibly cut down on fighting in recent years … until a guy comes along like Matt Rempe. Mazzulla complained that it doesn’t make sense that sports like baseball and hockey get to have the occasional fracas or donnybrook in the course of business, with mostly cursory repercussions, while the NBA brings down the hammer the instant a haymaker is thrown or a foot breaches the sideline. “They have bats and weapons!” Mazzulla protested. “We just have a ball. … And yet we’re not allowed to throw down a little bit?” In Coach Joe’s NBA, the Ron Artest incident would be rebranded as, like, “Palace Intrigue!” and the Celtics would act more like their fans, [extremely Boston accent] Shit-Startin’ at the Garden. What would the Royal Family think?
Howard, what was the zaniest part of the rest of the interview for you? Was it when Mazzulla talked about how he’d gone to Abu Dhabi and chatted with “their chairman—great guy, unbelievable” about the country’s national sport, jiu-jitsu? Was it the banter about Pedro Martínez fighting Don Zimmer in the 2003 ALCS?
Beck: I mean, it had to be that record-scratch moment when Mazzulla suggested a rules change so ambitious, so righteous, that it would make not just the NBA—but the whole damn world—a better place. “Like, what if we all walked around with like five coins, right?” Mazzulla said, and by we all he meant the human race generally. “And at any point in time, you can just hand one out, and you just challenge a guy to like, combat.” (No weapons allowed, he added as the Boston radio hosts sputtered and put their heads in their hands.) “If you do pull a coin on a guy and he beats you up,” Mazzulla continued, “like, that’s your fault. Like, you got to either train harder, or pick and choose your coins better.” Eh … sure, why not?
Baker: Is there any NBA player, coach, owner, GM, or mascot that you’d pull a Mazzullacoin on? I’ve never told anyone this, but I already successfully utilized one of mine during a beta test like a decade ago to get rid of that roided-out Sixers rabbit with my own bare hands. (He still haunts my dreams, though, so maybe he won.)
Beck: First, Katie, thank you for your service. The world owes you a debt of gratitude. (You don’t have to confirm, but I’ll just assume you also, ahem, took care of the original Pierre the Pelican.) As for me, I’m a pacifist like Terence Mann—I’m never gonna actually swing that crowbar, or serve up a Mazzullacoin. That said, I can think of a few teams I’d like to figuratively rough up for their needlessly obstructionist approach to the media.
Baker: I just realized we could also call it a “JoeBuck” … sorry, sorry! I’ll leave you with one final question: Joe Mazzulla popped off for nearly 10 straight minutes about basketball power plays and bench-clearing brawls and societal melee tokens—yet he never did answer that initial question about moving the 3-point line. Now I’m suspicious. What is he trying to hide?
Beck: Fair question! I’d ask him myself, but I’m allergic to rottweilers.
