Joe Mazzulla could have been anywhere.
He could have been back home in Rhode Island, decompressing after a Celtics season that started with everyone lowering expectations because of Jayson Tatum’s Achilles tear and ended with everyone furious because those lowered expectations had somehow turned into 56 wins and a blown 3-1 lead to Philadelphia.
He could have been holed up in the Red Auerbach Center, watching film of a missed weak-side rotation from February with the emotional urgency of a man solving
a murder. He could have been in Costa Rica again, walking barefoot through the jungle with a chess prodigy, because apparently the rest of us have been going about vacation all wrong.
Instead, he was in Portugal with Neemias Queta.
Chris Forsberg of NBC Sports Boston wrote a great piece this week on Mazzulla’s offseason travel, reporting that the Celtics head coach was spotted in both Omaha, Nebraska, and Lisbon, Portugal during the first week of June while spending time with Baylor Scheierman and Queta. Forsberg noted that the trip from Omaha to Lisbon is roughly 4,400 air miles, with no direct flights.
That is not a “swing by if you’re in the area” itinerary. That is multiple flights, time zones, airport coffee, stiff necks and at least one moment where you wake up in a hotel room with no idea what continent you’re in, let alone country.
And yet, there he was.
The more you look at these trips, the harder it becomes to treat them like irregular offseason moments. The point is not that Joe Mazzulla owns a passport or knows how to find Terminal B. The point is that connecting with his players on a human level seems to be an integral part of how he coaches.
The version of Joe we see is not the whole person
For most fans, Mazzulla is still understood through the strangest parts of his public personality.
The Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice with his sensei in the depths of the Celtics practice facility. The seemingly strong desire to one day execute a bank heist (either as the mastermind or safecracker). The refusal to answer simple questions in a simple way.
It’s funny, and a lot of the shtick is probably intentional. Mazzulla has never seemed especially interested in making himself easier to understand from the outside.
In some ways, the weirdness has become the package. You see the vacant stare, the deadpan expression, the quote that sounds like it was translated from English to Latin and back again, and you think, yep, that’s Joe.
But there is another version of him that keeps showing up in the way Celtics players talk about him.
That version seems to be much quieter and more grounded. He spends time, listens, and shows up in places he does not have to be.
Brad Stevens once told NBC Sports Boston that a player who had been around Mazzulla for individual and small group work said, “That guy can say anything to me because of the amount of time he spends with me.” That line gets at something coaches can sometimes pretend is more complicated than it is. Players usually know when someone is only showing up because the job requires it. They also know when someone is showing up because they care enough to understand the full person standing in front of them.
Mazzulla seems obsessed with that part.
Not in a soft, sentimental way. After all, this is still Joe Mazzulla we’re talking about. I’m not expecting him to start every practice with a group hug and a guided meditation unless the meditation somehow involves combat breathing and clips of the 2008 Celtics defending the strong-side corner.
But his approach seems rooted in a pretty human idea: you cannot demand everything from people if you are not willing to meet them where they actually are.
The miles are the message
Mazzulla’s approach off the court helps explain why the trips matter.
Going to Portugal with Queta is more than a coach supporting a player during the offseason. Mazzulla wanted to see the places that shaped his starting center before he became a rotation piece in Boston. The journey is about understanding what basketball looked like for Queta before TD Garden, before the NBA, before he became part of the Celtics’ nightly calculus.
The same goes for Scheierman at Creighton. Mazzulla is not just checking in on a player’s jumper or making sure Baylor didn’t trim that stunning mullet. He’s walking into the environment that helped make the player make sense.
Those moments have the ability to change the texture of a relationship.
As fans, we spend a lot of time talking about schemes, rotations and late-game decisions because those are the things we can see. Fair enough. Mazzulla should be judged on those things too. The Celtics’ offense got stagnant at times. The playoff loss to Philadelphia deserves real scrutiny. There are fair questions about how Boston evolves next season, especially with Tatum working his way back and Brown coming off the heaviest leadership burden of his career (on top of the onslaught of trade rumors to start the offseason).
But the relationship piece is not some decorative side dish that sits next to the actual coaching. It is the coaching.
When Mazzulla challenges players, his words land differently down the road if they know he has invested in them beyond the box score. When he asks Queta to defend without fouling, Queta knows his coach cared enough to fly across an ocean and see where his basketball story started. When he asks Scheierman to sharpen the details of his game, Scheierman knows Mazzulla took the time to show up in the place where his confidence first became tangible.
That doesn’t read like performative culture-building to me. It feels like someone taking the human part of the job seriously.
It’s also probably exhausting. I don’t know what Joe Mazzulla’s sleep schedule looks like, and I’m not sure I want to. There is a nonzero chance he views jet lag as a weakness leaving the body. But even if he is wired differently than most people, at the end of the day, the choice to keep showing up for his players is still a choice.
The caring part is easier to miss
Al Horford has talked about the caring side of Mazzulla before, saying players can see that he cares about them as people and that his genuineness is part of why they respect him.
Horford also shared the story of Mazzulla returning to a neighborhood in the Dominican Republic to run a clinic for kids, with no cameras and no desire for credit. That story is more revealing than a thousand press conference clips. That type of Joe is not one we ever really get to see when the cameras are rolling and the mics are hot. It’s simply a coach doing something decent because he wanted to be there.
Maybe Mazzulla prefers for that side to stay quieter.
Perhaps it’s easier for everyone to focus on the odd quotes and the intensity and the killer whale metaphors. Maybe that lets him keep the more sincere parts of his coaching style protected. It would be very Joe to hide the softest part of himself behind the least normal possible packaging.
But the pattern is getting harder to miss.
He goes to the Dominican Republic for Horford. He asks to attend Chris Boucher’s baptism in Montreal. He spends time with Scheierman at Creighton. He travels with Queta to Portugal.
At a certain point, these stop feeling like isolated anecdotes and start looking like the foundation of how he leads.
Trust is built before anyone needs it
Mazzulla doesn’t have to earn trust with speeches in the huddle or locker room. He is earning it with presence at times when basketball isn’t the primary focus.
The Celtics need plenty from him next season. As Stevens noted in his end-of-season presser, tactical adjustments must be made. The roster needs better answers when playoff possessions get tight, especially with the New York Knicks establishing themselves as a legitimate threat heading into next season. Mazzulla must help Brown, White, Pritchard and the rest of the roster navigate a year that may once again require a different kind of identity while Tatum comes back for his first full season after the Achilles tear.
They also need the locker room to keep believing in him when he pushes, prods, challenges and occasionally says something that makes everyone in the room wonder if they accidentally walked into a philosophy seminar being held inside an MMA gym.
That is what the trips help explain.
The strange quotes get noticed. The care for his players tells the story.
