With his brusque courtside manner, at times it can appear that Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla is never satisfied with how his team plays. And given how much he has drawn out of his roster, it is evident why he pushes so hard on his team to extract the very best play they can offer.
But in a contest that saw the Celtics unable to throw a pebble in the sea in the first half of their 129-116 home win vs. the Miami Heat on Friday (Dec. 19) night with several turnovers and other errors to point to, Mazzulla still thought his team played a good overall game against the Heat. “I thought we played well,” he explained. “I just thought there were moments of the game where they were obviously a little bit better than us, but I didn’t think we played poorly coming out of that.”
“I thought our effort was there,” he added. “I thought our intentionality was there. When you play small, that’s going to happen in other areas. It’s easy to see the negative side, but the positive is we just played so much faster on the offensive end, and we created good looks, and we got those.”
“So, it’s a trade off, and it’s easy to say what looked like it didn’t go well, but what went well was our offense,” said Mazzulla. “They weren’t able to switch us, they weren’t able to steer us, they weren’t able to keep us out of the paint.”
“We were able to create a lot of two-on-ones with our speed. So, I thought that was the tale in the second half. So yeah, obviously we have to get better, I mean, we’ll watch film tomorrow when we wake up, and there’s 20 possessions that we have to get better at, but I thought the effort and the intentionality was there.”
“We obviously have to do that, but tonight it was … about just kind of the offensive pace and speed that we had that got us good looks against a team that’s one of the best defensive teams in the league.”
Listen to “Havlicek Stole the Pod” on:
Blue Wire: https://tiny.ee/CdKp
iTunes: https://tiny.ee/RK47
YouTube: https://tiny.ee/cOW3