It appears Boston Celtics head coach has sparked a new tradition around the league with his coaching staff helping to drub the team media ahead of the start of the 2025-26 regular season. There had been rumbles that other clubs around the Association might give the Mazzulla Classic (as we here at the Celtics Wire will now call the media – coaching game moving forward) a try with their own coaches and press corp.
And now we see that at least some of those rumbles have become reality, with the Denver Nuggets having hosted a similar contest — and after hearing the results, it appears that Boston’s media may actually be one of the better press corps out there in terms of basketball competence, judging by the score.
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Per Denver Post reporter Bennett Durando, the Nuggets coaching staff came away with a 114-16 obliteration of the team’s media in a similar preseason exhibition contest.
Sep 25, 2025; Boston, MA, USA; Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla runs on a treadmill at the Auerbach Center. Mandatory Credit: Eric Canha-Imagn Images
“Thanks, Joe Mazzulla,” wrote Durando in his assessment of said drubbing. “That’s all my internal monologue could muster as I sprinted back in transition again, legs on autopilot by now, after our fourth — fifth? — consecutive live-ball turnover.”
“His idea was equal parts earnest and diabolical. Coaching staff vs. Media. Player development specialists against beat writers and podcasters. A good-natured exercise in relationship-building that doubled as an admittedly amusing experiment in the basketball talent gap between NBA coaches and the people who cover them. (…)”
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“My only regret is that players and coaches weren’t instructed to file an instant story at the buzzer, conduct postgame interviews, update their gamers with quotes on deadline, then do a second story,” added Durando.
Oct 22, 2025; Boston, Massachusetts, USA; A Wilson NBA basketball goes through the net before the game between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers at TD Garden. Mandatory Credit: Winslow Townson-Imagn Images
That tidbit is brilliant if it is truly relationship-building and generating collective understanding of what our roles are as media. But in our opinion, this does not take the exercise far enough. We should also have a senior member of the media to gruffly bat away what, to us, the media, seem like queries from the coaches with obvious answers.
We would also have them to wait close to an hour for their first batch of answers, then 20 more minutes for the next, then 25 more for a third round while we shower and work out postgame, our reporters testy and reserved after getting blown out. And while we haven’t figured out a way to mock up this aspect of the relationship between the media and the team, we’ll have to work up future interview opportunities for the coaching team to try to get the info they need out of a member of the media team after having said something critical of that journo.
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And while few would have much sympathy for the qualms of a profession who get to forge a career covering the biggest stars of a glamorous sport for a living any more than they would most of the complaints about media coverage NBA stars tend to have, we’re very much here for a chance to better understand our peers.
No matter how award that final score turns out to be in the process of so doing.
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This article originally appeared on Celtics Wire: Mazzulla sparks new era in NBA media-team relations with Celtics media game