Inside his TD Garden office, Joe Mazzulla bounces a soccer ball between his feet. Ten times, drop. Twenty, drop. One juggle gets as high as 50 before it hits the floor. It’s 15 minutes before the Celtics’ opener against Philadelphia, before the defending Eastern Conference champions kick off a season with lofty expectations, before Mazzulla, Boston’s 34-year-old head coach, begins his first year on the job. These are the moments Mazzulla dreads. Not coaching. Mazzulla loves coaching. The deafening roar of the crowd? The Garden is a little rowdier than the Feaster Center, the 2,711-seat capacity home of Division II Fairmont State, Mazzulla’s last head-coaching gig. But it doesn’t faze him. Drawing up end-of-game plays? Mazzulla has been dreaming those up since 2009, when a career-threatening shoulder injury at West Virginia forced him to reexamine his basketball future. It’s the quiet minutes right before the games that make him anxious. “I get bored,” says Mazzulla. “So I do dumb stuff. Like juggling.”
When he gets to the bench, Mazzulla settles into the head coach’s chair, a few feet from the scorer’s table, one row in front of where Mazzulla sat last season, when he was an unheralded assistant on Ime Udoka’s staff. He glances into the stands. He’s sat there before, many times. For Celtics games, even an NCAA tournament, making the 90-minute drive from Johnston, R.I., as a teenager with a cheap ticket in the upper bowl.
He thinks of his father, Dan, a Rhode Island legend. Dan Mazzulla played college ball at then-Division II Bryant. He spent five seasons playing professionally in Chile before returning home, where he became a fixture in high school coaching. Joe was a regular at Dan’s practices. He remembers the energy Dan brought to coaching. “He was passionate,” Mazzulla said. “He wasn’t afraid to tell you about yourself.” He recalls the lengths Dan, who passed away in 2020, would go to pull the most out of his players. “He was just relentless,” says Mazzulla. “And I just loved watching that. The way he led it was ‘I see something in you; I’m not going to stop until we get it out of you.’ You weren’t going to like him sometimes and that was O.K.”
