In reality, they're all close calls. I don't think he's an idiot for not calling timeout, because I think he wanted the Tatum/Maxey matchup. I don't think you, or anyone else who wanted to call a timeout, are idiots for wanting him to call a timeout.
This is where I'm at. Watching it live, I thought:
- We got good looks, so letting it ride was clearly something the team was prepared for and were running a play
- Tatum idling too long in OT was what ultimately got us (in retrospect, but also at the time: as the tension built for that last possession, I'm sure me and everyone else was screaming "DO SOMETHING", at least in their heads)
I didn't have a big problem with Mazzulla not calling TO there, maybe a little problem at most. We rallied back from 16 down to 5 up in a playoff game in a little more than a quarter, our guys (especially Horford) generally played their asses off, it went from a blowout to a coin flip, and you lose some coin flips. But that journey was a positive overall. Our later-game adjustments there worked, and/or our better conditioning again yielded an advantage late in the game, and either way it's auspicious for the rest of the series.
That said, I do understand and agree with the perspective that taking the TO and drawing up ATO plays would've yielded more calm execution at the end there. And particularly in OT, we began with 16 seconds down 1, and we could've run one play, and if it didn't work, fouled and then advanced the ball and run another, given ourselves two chances there (as DBMH's quoted tweet observed). That makes sense, and (I'd agree) it's what most coaches would do. But I'm not going to lose my mind over it and say it was a 100% slam-dunk in either direction, not like this guy:
If Marcus Smart shooting a 3 there is a good result for Mazzulla , then he shouldn't be coaching an NBA team.
Like, some people don't seem to even understand the difference between "overall average 3-pt %" and "3-pt % on open and wide-open looks", but they are undiminished in vehemence or confidence of their analysis. If our scheme got Marcus Smart
wide-open 3s for the win, which it did, that was a successful plan. What we were trying to do "worked". That it didn't go in (in time) is outcome-driven thinking rather than process-driven thinking. There IS a valid process-based critique here (see above), but outcome-driven reasoning is twitter-esque fan garbage, compounded by the over-the-top conclusion. It's a half step above saying that the guys "didn't want it badly enough" or some lowest-common-denominator BS. I think most of us here are better than that, whether we were fine with the no-timeout or would've strongly preferred a timeout.