Joe Mazzulla could have been anywhere.<\/p>\n
He could have been back home in Rhode Island, decompressing after a Celtics season that started with everyone lowering expectations because of Jayson Tatum\u2019s Achilles tear and ended with everyone furious because those lowered expectations had somehow turned into 56 wins and a blown 3-1 lead to Philadelphia<\/a>.<\/p>\n He could have been holed up in the Red Auerbach Center, watching film of a missed weak-side rotation from February with the emotional urgency of a man solving a murder. He could have been in Costa Rica again, walking barefoot through the jungle with a chess prodigy<\/a>, because apparently the rest of us have been going about vacation all wrong.<\/p>\n Instead, he was in Portugal with Neemias Queta.<\/p>\n Chris Forsberg of NBC Sports Boston wrote a great piece this week<\/a> on Mazzulla\u2019s offseason travel, reporting that the Celtics head coach was spotted in both Omaha, Nebraska, and Lisbon, Portugal during the first week of June while spending time with Baylor Scheierman and Queta. Forsberg noted that the trip from Omaha to Lisbon is roughly 4,400 air miles, with no direct flights.<\/p>\n That is not a \u201cswing by if you\u2019re in the area\u201d itinerary. That is multiple flights, time zones, airport coffee, stiff necks and at least one moment where you wake up in a hotel room with no idea what continent you\u2019re in, let alone country.<\/p>\n The more you look at these trips, the harder it becomes to treat them like irregular offseason moments. The point is not that Joe Mazzulla owns a passport or knows how to find Terminal B. The point is that connecting with his players on a human level seems to be an integral part of how he coaches.<\/p>\n The version of Joe we see is not the whole person<\/p>\n For most fans, Mazzulla is still understood through the strangest parts of his public personality.<\/p>\n The Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice with his sensei in the depths of the Celtics practice facility. The seemingly strong desire to one day execute a bank heist (either as the mastermind or safecracker<\/a>). The refusal to answer simple questions in a simple way.<\/p>\n It\u2019s funny, and a lot of the shtick is probably intentional. Mazzulla has never seemed especially interested in making himself easier to understand from the outside.<\/p>\n In some ways, the weirdness has become the package. You see the vacant stare, the deadpan expression, the quote that sounds like it was translated from English to Latin and back again, and you think, yep, that\u2019s Joe.<\/p>\n But there is another version of him that keeps showing up in the way Celtics players talk about him.<\/p>\n That version seems to be much quieter and more grounded. He spends time, listens, and shows up in places he does not have to be.<\/p>\n Brad Stevens once told NBC Sports Boston that a player who had been around Mazzulla for individual and small group work said, \u201cThat guy can say anything to me because of the amount of time he spends with me.\u201d That line gets at something coaches can sometimes pretend is more complicated than it is. Players usually know when someone is only showing up because the job requires it. They also know when someone is showing up because they care enough to understand the full person standing in front of them.<\/p>\n Mazzulla seems obsessed with that part.<\/p>\n Not in a soft, sentimental way. After all, this is still Joe Mazzulla we\u2019re talking about. I\u2019m not expecting him to start every practice with a group hug and a guided meditation unless the meditation somehow involves combat breathing and clips of the 2008 Celtics defending the strong-side corner.<\/p>\n But his approach seems rooted in a pretty human idea: you cannot demand everything from people if you are not willing to meet them where they actually are.<\/p>\n The miles are the message<\/p>\n Mazzulla\u2019s approach off the court helps explain why the trips matter.<\/p>\n Going to Portugal with Queta is more than a coach supporting a player during the offseason. Mazzulla wanted to see the places that shaped his starting center before he became a rotation piece in Boston. The journey is about understanding what basketball looked like for Queta before TD Garden, before the NBA, before he became part of the Celtics\u2019 nightly calculus.<\/p>\n The same goes for Scheierman at Creighton. Mazzulla is not just checking in on a player\u2019s jumper or making sure Baylor didn\u2019t trim that stunning mullet. He\u2019s walking into the environment that helped make the player make sense<\/a>.<\/p>\n Those moments have the ability to change the texture of a relationship.<\/p>\n As fans, we spend a lot of time talking about schemes, rotations and late-game decisions because those are the things we can see. Fair enough. Mazzulla should be judged on those things too. The Celtics\u2019 offense got stagnant at times. The playoff loss to Philadelphia deserves real scrutiny. There are fair questions about how Boston evolves next season, especially with Tatum working his way back and Brown coming off the heaviest leadership burden of his career (on top of the onslaught of trade rumors to start the offseason).<\/p>\n But the relationship piece is not some decorative side dish that sits next to the actual coaching. It is the coaching.<\/p>\n When Mazzulla challenges players, his words land differently down the road if they know he has invested in them beyond the box score. When he asks Queta to defend without fouling, Queta knows his coach cared enough to fly across an ocean and see where his basketball story started. When he asks Scheierman to sharpen the details of his game, Scheierman knows Mazzulla took the time to show up in the place where his confidence first became tangible.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t read like performative culture-building to me. It feels like someone taking the human part of the job seriously.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also probably exhausting. I don\u2019t know what Joe Mazzulla\u2019s sleep schedule looks like, and I\u2019m not sure I want to. There is a nonzero chance he views jet lag as a weakness leaving the body. But even if he is wired differently than most people, at the end of the day, the choice to keep showing up for his players is still a choice.<\/p>\n The caring part is easier to miss<\/p>\n Al Horford has talked about the caring side of Mazzulla before, saying players can see that he cares about them as people and that his genuineness is part of why they respect him.<\/p>\n