Beantown Rundown: Joe Mazzulla is officially hurting the Celtics

The Celtics recent struggles can be traced back to Joe Mazzulla.

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

Mandatory Credit: Eric Canha-Imagn Images
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.