Disclaimer:We got off days, man. One of these days, maybe pour an extra cup in the morning and knock out a long-form thread-starter post on how you'd characterize the themes and tradeoff decisions of the 23-24 Boston Celtics. I've been watching them all year, but I don't know ball well enough to be able to articulate it in depth, beyond seeing a few things that become obvious like the KP post game, offensive boarding by crashing from the corners, and our tendency to not help when facing good perimeter shooting. I'd love to get a deep dive that can Mazzullasplain the grand strategy, and make the last two rounds (God willing) more enjoyable for us here.
I never played basketball competitively. Our other posters on the forum who have, like HRB, tend to have better insights about things like the effect of a star sitting out, or a 1pm start time after a series win.
On the other hand, I do watch and rewatch a lot of basketball, and am pretty comfortable with what many teams are trying to do in Xs and Os. It's not rocket science if you get into it; most reasonably smart people can get a long way.
I'm not basing the below on anything except watching games and a couple Mazzulla quotes that didn't seem like coach-speak. The savvy basketball media, by and large, has done a poor job of what the principles of the Celtics' offense are. @AdamTaylorNBA has done great taxonomical work on what makes up the offense and the actions it goes to, but not as much on the "why".
MazzullaBall, Part 1: Motivations
Joe Mazzulla has been a Celtics' assistant and now head coach for awhile, through a few iterations of the present core group. The current offense he implements is best seen as problem-solving for issues that have afflicted that core group over the years, as well as a couple more generic NBA challenges. Those problems are:
1. How do you handle teams sending late help to Tatum and Brown? The Celtics have had a good offense for years with Tatum initiating in PnR, but it tends to get bogged down in the playoffs. The best blueprint has been the "Tatum Rules" that Spoelstra and Kerr employed to great success, where you force Tatum to commit to driving, and then send late help at predetermined times. He has a hard time knowing what the read is, and often makes a non-advantage pass, takes what ends up being a 1-on-2 (or 3) shot, or turns it over.
Some players (like Luka and LeBron) are amazing at handling this type of defense, and will eat it for lunch. Tatum isn't that guy, and so this strategy was pretty effective at grinding the C's offense to a halt, since they become indecisive and don't know how to create an initial advantage anymore.
2. How do you fix the "clown car" drive-and-kick offense? I think Zach Lowe coined this term, and it was referring to a pattern the 2021-23 Celtics had of driving, kicking, driving, kicking and not knowing exactly what the point was. When it worked, it looked like the late 2022 regular season run, and looked good. However, it wasn't maximizing the talent on the floor, and it wasn't completely clear to the players what the objective of a possession was.
3. How do you maximally utilize a roster filled with good shooters and decision makers? This sounds like a great problem to have, but the offense could often devolve into those shooters and decision makers spotting up around the perimeter, which isn't maximally threatening.
4. How do you let your offense put your defense in the best possible position? The Celtics clearly decided at some point that missed layups were killer, and led to ridiculously high point expectations going the other way. This sucks, however, because layups are valuable shots! How do you implement offensive principles that get you layups while reducing missed layups? That sounds impossible, or at least obvious: make more shots! However, the actual implementation is quite clever.
5. Finally, how do you maximize the things that Jayson Tatum is good at? He's a different offensive player than Jokic, or Luka, or SGA, or Giannis, and it's tempting to focus on his flaws. However, he does a number of things really well on the offensive end, and there are some situations in which opposing coaches are terrified of him. They hate ignoring him off-ball, because he's so good attacking a scrambling defense. He's gotten massively better at bullying guys 1-on-1. And his stepback 3, if not bothered, is a shot that coaches are unwilling to concede. He also is a good decision-maker and reads defenses well, although not at the most elite level.
Next, I'll get into the principles of MazzullaBall, and it should be obvious how most of them are direct solutions to these problems.