Mazzulla is NBA awards season's biggest snub
The arrival of NBA awards season means that for every worthy winner, there are bound to be a couple of disappointed runners-up and a longer list of jilted stars who didn’t earn enough votes to even qualify as finalists.
But the biggest snub this year isn’t a player. It’s not Clippers sixth man Norman Powell or even Lakers superstar Anthony Davis, despite their protestations. No, this year’s biggest snub is Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla.
With all due respect to the finalists for the Red Auerbach Trophy – the winner will be announced Sunday evening – the voters got it wrong.
Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault deserves tremendous praise for leading the youngest No. 1 seed in league history. Timberwolves bench boss Chris Finch helped mold a legitimate contender in Minnesota for the first time in two decades. Magic coach Jamahl Mosley grew with his young team to end a four-year playoff drought. But even if your criteria for Coach of the Year rewards overachievement and maximizing the talent at one’s disposal, the answer still should’ve been Mazzulla.
Even though Boston was a strong candidate to finish with the league’s best record, no one can claim they saw this roster producing one of the most dominant regular seasons in NBA history.
The Celtics didn’t just lead the pack this season, they lapped the field. Their 64 wins left them seven games clear of any other team in the overall standings, making them just the fifth squad this century to enjoy such a cushion.
Boston also finished 14 games ahead of the second-place Knicks in the Eastern Conference. That’s the biggest gap between a conference’s top two teams since the 1975-76 Warriors finished 16 games clear of the second-place Sonics in the West.
Some might chalk that up to injury issues for Boston’s biggest intraconference rivals, or to the East’s general mediocrity, but the Celtics didn’t just beat up on their own conference. They were 23-7 against the West, posting outrageous numbers against the entire league.
Only four teams have ever posted a better point differential than the 2023-24 Celtics, who outscored opponents by an average of 11.34 points per game. Dig deeper and you’ll find the gap in net rating (per 100 possessions) between Boston and the West-leading Thunder was the fourth-largest ever between the league’s top two teams.
While Boston’s offseason acquisitions would’ve made any coach’s job easier, it was still on Mazzulla to figure out how to best utilize the new pieces.
With Kristaps Porzingis’ inside-out game tying everything together, Mazzulla’s Celtics produced the most efficient offense of all time. Lest anyone dismiss that as the product of modern scoring trends, consider that no Celtics team in the franchise’s 78-year history has outperformed the league-average offense to the extent this year’s squad did (plus-7.9 points per 100 possessions). Not the Big Three Celtics of the late aughts, not the Celtics of Bird, McHale, and Parish. Not even the teams featuring Russell, Cousy, or Havlicek.
Critics will point to Boston’s propensity for falling in love with 3-pointers under Mazzulla – and the occasional crunch-time woes that strategy brings – but the evidence suggests this offense is just about unflappable.
On the other end, adding Porzingis’ rim protection and replacing former Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart with Jrue Holiday has helped Boston maintain an elite defense that’s become even more adaptable.
Holiday and Derrick White form the league’s best defensive backcourt. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are good defensive forwards who can guard up or down. Porzingis lurks behind them all. Al Horford remains a versatile and smart defensive big. But it’s Mazzulla who brilliantly and creatively deploys them all – even if that means using the 6-foot-4 Holiday at the center of a zone.
Add it all up, and the Celtics just put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable two-way seasons the NBA has ever seen, becoming just the 10th team in history to finish in the top two in both offensive and defensive rating. Even more jaw-dropping, Mazzulla’s teams have produced two of those 10 seasons in the 35-year-old’s first two years on the job.
That statistical excellence comes with a catch. Of the four teams that accomplished the feat over the previous 47 seasons, last year’s Celtics were the only squad to fall short of a championship. So while Mazzulla achieved the rare feat of significantly improving an already dominant, 57-win club, the rarified air his Celtics find themselves in comes with no guarantee of postseason success. A Game 2 home loss to the Jimmy Butler-less Heat was a rude reminder of that.
But Coach of the Year is a regular-season award. And after the season we just witnessed, it seems rather ludicrous that Mazzulla’s performance was deemed unworthy of even a top-three finish.
Joseph Casciaro is theScore’s senior content producer.
