Celtics’ title run fueled by being comfortable with the uncomfortable

Celtics’ title run fueled by being comfortable with the uncomfortable originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

Throughout his first season in green, Jrue Holiday couldn’t stop marveling at how much his new head coach Joe Mazzulla seemed to revel in uncomfortable situations.

Mazzulla seemed to go out of his way to put both himself, and his players, in tense situations. And it took time to realize there was always an unconventional method to his madness.

“Of anybody that I’ve known, [Mazzulla has] embraced adversity, I think, the most,” said Holiday. “It’s kind of to the point where it’s kind of scary. I feel like he loves it. He loves it because he knows that it’s gonna mold us and it’s gonna help us grow.

“I think a lot of people, even myself, it’s hard to put yourself in a challenging or compromising position. And I feel like he does it. I feel like he does it for himself, he does it for us. Especially knowing the type of talent that we had last year. Him doing his best to put us in compromising situations so that, when we get to that last game, Game 4, Game 5 of a series, or Game 5 [of the Finals], a championship game, we’ll fight through it and be able to win.”

The Celtics are back in Indiana on Wednesday night for the first time since ripping the Pacers’ heart out multiple times with impossibly crisp late-game play that fueled a more-difficult-than-it-looked sweep of Indiana in the 2024 Eastern Conference Finals.

It was Holiday who produced a game-sealing steal in Boston’s feverish rally to win Game 3 in Indiana. Jaylen Brown’s heroics throughout the series helped him earn ECF MVP honors.

A big question surrounding the Celtics entering the playoffs was whether they could consistently rise to the challenge in crunch-time situations. Boston’s regular-season clutch numbers were good, but the eye test suggested the team didn’t always thrive in those situations. Those numbers seemed to be juiced by some late-game lapses that sometimes made the score more uncomfortable than it needed to be.

But that was, at least occasionally, just part of Mazzulla’s madness.

In the playoffs, the Celtics were at…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/celtics-title-run-fueled-being-170141747.html

Author : NBC Sports Boston

Publish date : 2024-10-30 17:01:00

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