Joe Mazzulla won his first game as coach of the Boston Celtics Sunday. The 134-93 pre-season romp over the Charlotte Hornets occurred only eight days after he became interim head coach of one of the most storied franchises anywhere in sports.
Joe Mazzulla, a coach’s kid from Johnston, a former star at Bishop Hendricken High School and West Virginia University, is on his way.
Jamal Gomes is not surprised.
“What I witnessed in his first practice was the making of a future great NBA coach. He ran that practice like a 10-year veteran NBA coach. The level of organization was jaw-dropping. I spent the entire day with him, his first day as head coach of the Boston Celtics,” he told me last week.
Gomes is the long-time coach of the Hendricken Hawks. Mazzulla played for him for four years, won three Rhode Island Interscholastic League state championships, was All-State three times and the Rhode Island Gatorade player of the year twice.
Gomes remained close to Mazzulla during his five years at West Virginia, when the Mountaineers won the NIT and reached the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament. They spoke regularly during Mazzulla’s stints as an assistant coach at Glenville State and Fairmont State in West Virginia, a season with the Maine Red Claws of the NBA’s G League, two years as head coach at Fairmont State and three as a back row assistant with the Celtics. He was just a phone call away when the Celtics suspended head coach Ime Udoka for an intimate relationship with a female in the Celtics organization and promoted Mazzulla on an interim basis.
So, Jamal Gomes knows Joe Mazzulla as well as anybody knows Joe Mazzulla. He described their relationship as “close and tight” and said the Mazzulla family “is like my own family.”
Gomes is convinced Mazzulla can do this job.
“Over the past three years he has developed good relationships with the players. They listen to him. He has the support of Jayson Tatum, Al Horford, Jaylen Brown. He knows that has to continue to be earned. He understands what the challenges will be. He has such a graceful, calm demeanor,” Gomes said.
“It also helps when the president of basketball operations has your back,” he added with a chuckle.
Brad Stevens hired Mazzulla in 2019. They worked together for two years. When Stevens was bumped to president of basketball operations, he retained Mazzulla for Udoka’s staff.
Stevens could have returned to the bench last week but instead chose Mazzulla to lead a team with championship aspirations. The Celtics lost to the Warriors in the NBA Finals last June in six games.
Mazzulla is only 34 but has been thinking like a coach since high school. No surprise there. His father, the late Danny Mazzulla, was a star at Bryant College and a coaching institution in Johnston.
“He was another head coach on the court,” Gomes said of Joe. “He could see things happening before they happened. He could bring the team together. He would point things out to me and say, ‘I think we should run this.’ “
Off-court experiences in college also helped form Mazzulla as a coach. He had trouble with alcohol, was arrested twice and was suspended from the team briefly. He had to be resilient to rebound from those setbacks.
“No doubt Joe had some struggles. He was a young guy, and people make mistakes. . . . Joe learned from his mistakes and is better for it in the end,” Gomes told me.
Faith played a role.
“The way he has developed his faith in God, he is one of the most faithful and most Catholic people anybody could know. I have friends who are priests, and who are friends of Joe, and they are amazed at his Catholicity. One of the big reasons Joe has this opportunity is he has been blessed by God,” Gomes said.
Mazzulla invited Gomes to the Celtics opening practice last week.
“I was so impressed and proud,” the old coach said. “It was a media frenzy. There must have been 40 or 50 cameras. His first day and he has to get in front of the cameras and explain how practice went. He did it like a seasoned pro. It was amazing.”
Mazzulla gave him a tour of the Red Auerbach Center in Boston and introduced him to everybody. Stevens spent a few minutes with him. Gomes met the training staff, the sports scientist, the stats crunchers. Then Mazzulla invited Gomes to attend a film breakdown.
“He has 14 assistant coaches, and he ran that meeting like a seasoned CEO of a company for 20 years. His first day as head coach, and he orchestrated it like a veteran,” Gomes said, still awe-struck a day later.
“What I was able to witness was a world-class organization at work behind the scenes that nobody knows about. I know a lot about basketball and coached a lot of great players. What I saw was unbelievable.”
During one of their many conversations in recent years, Mazzulla confided to Gomes that his goal “is to get to the NBA, become an NBA head coach and enjoy a prosperous career as an NBA coach.”
He is well on his way.
“Nobody can tell the future,” Jamal Gomes said, “but based on what I saw, Joe Mazzulla has a great future.”
