The 2023-24 NBA regular season is underway, with many underdog teams surprising their rivals by positioning themselves high on the points table and maintaining that position. One of those is the Boston Celtics. Even though they haven’t won an NBA championship since 2008, the team has shown significant signs of improvement for the past few years and has currently managed to place themselves as the top seed on the Easter Conference points table.
While much of the success can be credited to the performance of players like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, another individual who deserves an equal amount of praise is head coach Joe Mazzulla. A few hours ago, The Athletic released a feature article on Joe Mazzulla.
It highlighted how the 35-year-old has managed to lead the Celtics to an impressive 47 out of 59 win record by taking inspiration from a specific individual: Manchester City manager Josep “Pep” Guardiola. Jaylen Brown helped to add context to the story by highlighting the coach’s love for soccer.
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Jaylen Brown: “Joe definitely is a huge soccer fan, but you can tell that his coaching style is soccer influenced. You can tell the way his input on our offense on how to play the game, make the right reads, see the play kind of develop before. Joe is heavily influenced on… https://t.co/mZVDlXuNFu
— Jared Weiss (@JaredWeissNBA) March 2, 2024
“Joe (Mazzulla) definitely is a huge soccer fan, but you can tell that his coaching style is soccer influenced” said Brown. “You can tell the way his input on our offense on how to play the game, make the right reads, see the play kind of develop before. Joe is heavily influenced on soccer.”
The 27-year-old shooting guard recalled how the head coach once went to explore Manchester City just for his affection towards the team. While he highlighted that both he and Mazzulla share a mutual love for soccer, the same couldn’t have been said about their choice of favorite team.
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“Personally I’m a little bit more of an Arsenal fan, but it’s all good,” Brown was quoted saying during the article. This led the conversation to surround the coaching style and inspiration Mazzulla derives from soccer and brings to the table for himself as well.
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Joe Mazzulla calls Pep Guardiola “the best coach” in any sportBy providing an insight into the ‘philosophies’ that Pep Guardiola made use of to provide an edge to the Manchester soccer team, Mazzulla highlighted that the transitionary and free-flowing nature of both sports is not as different as one might hope. “That is what the game of basketball is about, to me, and what counterattacking in soccer is about,” said Mazzulla. “So I study a lot of Man City. I study Pep a lot. I think he’s the best coach at any level, in any sport. It’s had a huge influence.”
USA Today via Reuters
Another aspect through which the Celtics coach highlighted the interconnected nature of basketball and soccer was the offensive and defensive style of playing in both sports.
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“Everybody tries to break basketball up into offense and defense, but it’s one game. If your transition defense sucks, everybody talks about your transition defense” Mazzulla continued. “I think where basketball and soccer are the same is the transition is happening so fast. You can be on offense and two seconds later, you can be on defense. So the game is constantly changing.”
Source : EssentiallySports