redslastlaugh wrote:CeltsfanNLA wrote:I wanted to come through here to find out how people view coach today. There's a lot to love about Mazzulla but I also feel like his ego got in the way of us repeating. There are 2 big issues I have with him and how he handled last season and I wanted everyone's take on them.
1st issue is upping the 3 point attempts after winning a championship. Not only did the Celtics win, but they flat out dominated only losing 3 games the entire playoffs. He upped the 3 point attempts by 6 per game after already being over 40 attempts the year before. Why would you change strategy after such a dominating season?
This is a fair criticism a lot of posters have mentioned. Increasing the 3PTA by so much year over year (14%) was such a strange change to a formula that had worked so well?
Some thoughts:
1) The amount of mins Porzingis played decreased by 28% from 23-24 season to 24-25. These past couple years, one thing I've noticed is that when Porzingis plays, we are less reliant on the 3 ball because we have a dominant big man we can throw lobs to, who can also post up out of low post, mid post, high post, etc.
This is mainly because you go from KP (can shoot 3's but also has a lot of ways he can score inside the arc such as lobs, post ups, etc.) to Horford at the 5 who could pretty much only score by shooting 3's.
Plus, Pritchard took on a larger role last season..he was very good (won 6MOY) but is mainly just a guy who scores via 3's.
Horford, Pritchard, Hauser. All guys who just score by shooting 3's. Jrue and D-white as well, to some extent.
Blame Mazzulla if you must, but he as a coach you often just run offense based on the personel you have to work with.
2) "He upped the 3 point attempts by 6 per game after already being over 40 attempts the year before" the way you worded this sentence (and other parts of your post) seem to imply that 100% of what happens in a Celtics game is attributed to the head coach..it seems to imply that it's like a video game where 100% of the moves the players make and the shots the players take are determined by the head coach, like the players are simply robots being controlled by Mazzulla. That is *not* the case. Sure, the head coach has some say..he puts a system in place, he can call plays out here and there. But even if he calls a play and the first option for that play is X, well the opposing team (especially if they're a good team with good defensive players, a good coach..) will take that option away, deny the ball from going where the Celtics want it to, etc. so then the players need to figure something else out on the fly - or they go to the 2nd option for that play which might be an open 3.
Who knows, but the point is, the players are the ones actually playing the game and taking the shots - not the coach. And the players shots are often dictated (at least to some extent) by the opposing team, and how they defend that play and they might change things up on the fly to defend it differently than what the Celtics were expecting.
Like the Warriors game when they kept leaving Jaylen Brown open for a bunch of 3's on purpose. Games like that can make it look like we take more 3's. But it's just the way our opponent defended us. Also, Miami beat us in 2023 ECF, partly because they sagged off our shooters, clogged up the driving lanes, brought a 2nd defender anytime one of the Jays tried to drive into the paint..brought everyone to try and shut down the Jays and dare our role players like Grant, Horford, Brogdon (who they knew had an injured elbow), Smart, etc. to beat them from the outside. Miami knew if our 3's weren't falling, they'd win. So they purposely baited us into shooting more 3's and took away the paint - even though we still ended up scoring more points in the paint that series than Miami but the Mazzulla haters don't want to acknowledge that
Well, ever since that series, more teams have tried to copy that strategy to try and beat us. Which might be part of the reason why we took more 3's last season - because opposing teams were forcing us to.
Lastly, I just looked up some numbers. In the regular season last year:
Celtics record when shooting 50+ 3's = 31-7 (.815 winning %)
Celtics record when shooting less than 50 3's = 30-14 (.681 winning %)
So both winning percentages are very high. But the winning % was much higher when we shot 50+ 3's in the game.
Sure, we had some games in the playoffs (especially vs Knicks) where we shot a very high volume of 3's and lost. But that is a very small sample size of games..regular season is much larger sample size so the data is more meaningful. It's more likely that the losses to knicks were due to our injuries, as well as just having unfortunate shooting luck.
Edit: also some good points made by Smart2Nesmith about how we had short offseason in 2024, our guys played in Olympics, etc. so that also likely contributed to why we shot more 3's last season..
