Joe Mazzulla broke camp this week by telling everyone that the Celtics are not planning on anybody playing a full season. He said it more than once, in more than one way, and he was not hedging.
“Regardless of who it is, the standard and expectation of playing all 82 isn’t realistic,” Mazzulla said. “Eighty-two games is not the standard or the expectation.”
Given his roster, that is not caution. That is arithmetic.
Look at who he is coaching
Jayson Tatum is approaching full health after missing the first 62 games last season with a ruptured Achilles. He has described this camp as tough, which is what a player says when he is being pushed back toward a workload.
Paul George is 36 and played only 78 games across his two seasons in Philadelphia. Mitchell Robinson has been hurt for most of the past four seasons and has played 70 or more games once.
And the kicker: only Derrick White, Payton Pritchard and Mike Conley have ever played all 82 in a season, and none of them more than once.
He is not treating it as an excuse
This is the part that separates Mazzulla’s version from load management as a brand. He explicitly said players who can go will go.
“If guys can play they’re going to play, even if they feel like they can’t,” he said. “It’s not like we come in and tell guys they have to play 82 games or make that the standard.”
Then he pointed at the people making the calls: “We trust our sports and science team. That’s why we have 10 of them.”
Ten staffers is an investment. A coach who has 10 of them and then overrides their recommendations is wasting money.
Why saying it out loud is smart
Every team manages minutes. Most coaches pretend otherwise until a star is listed as out for rest in February and the broadcast spends a quarter on it.
Mazzulla put the expectation on the record in October, before the first rest night, before the first angry ticket-holder, before the first national television window gets diminished. He has now pre-empted the entire conversation and framed it as player health rather than competitive indifference.
He also did it from a position of standing. Boston’s coach has won a championship and does not need to justify his approach to anyone.
Camp went clean
Three days at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, ended with no injuries. Boston opens the preseason Thursday against Cleveland.
The Eastern Conference has reorganized around the champion Knicks, LeBron James and Joel Embiid in Philadelphia, and Giannis Antetokounmpo in Miami. Boston is trying to get a 28-year-old back from an Achilles rupture and squeeze value out of two injury-prone veterans.
Promising 82 games from that group would have been a lie. Mazzulla did not bother telling it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.