Love it. I think we also forget that "adjustments" can't just be robotically implemented. The players clearly had trouble executing the scheme, probably due to effort issues, but maybe lack of familiarity too.
Joe Mazzulla officially named head coach
- Thread starter Beale13
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Interesting stat....
View: https://twitter.com/MichaelVPina/status/1785313908045033802
Joe Mazz appears to be winning the ATO battle against Spo (in fairness he has better talent to work with).
View: https://twitter.com/MichaelVPina/status/1785313908045033802
Joe Mazz appears to be winning the ATO battle against Spo (in fairness he has better talent to work with).
That's pretty amazing considering there are matchups like OKC-NO, where OKC has a 93.5 DRtg, and ORL-CLE, where ORL has a 96.8 DRtg.
(Interesting that ORL has the #4 NetRtg in the playoffs currently at +10.7 but are only 2-2.
The talent is way better, but given how many people were ready to crown Spo's ass in this coaching matchup, CJM needs to get a lot of credit.
Even the one "bad" gameplan in game 2 probably looks a lot better if the players execute closeouts properly and play with effort.
He's doing a lot better in his Heat Challenge than Brad, Ime, or Joe 1.0 did. The team is so, so focused, and one step ahead of most of Spo's moves.
Spo also isn't really an ATO wizard, he's good at it, but most of his stuff is gameplan, defense switching.
The big thing I've noticed is.... even after KP went out... the Celtics just are not phased by zone anymore. They went to it last night with KP out, and even without the KP cheat code, Celtics worked it, got a mistake out of the D, hit a wide open 3 from White, went down, worked it some more and Spo swapped out.
Scal said after G3 - and I agree with him - that from the Cs POV, this isn't a series about adjustments. It's not like the Cs have to figure out who is guarding whom or where help is coming from. It's not like the Cs are changing substitution patters or where players are being stationed or what actions they are running.
The Cs are better than MIA and if they play with intention and physicality, they are going to win. They just need to keep doing what they've done in the regular season and what they are doing here in this series.
Which is not what happened in G2.
It was great that CJM didn't overreact to that clunker.
No one's going to give him credit because they were supposed to beat the corpse of the Heat, but Mazzulla did great stuff to attack mismatches out of empty PnR and on the move. Instead of iso'ing Herro, they kept bringing his man in to screen, and then were able to attack him while he was switching and chasing the play. Really good stuff to exploit a shitty defender while not letting Miami load up with late help.
In the calculus of "CJM vs Udoka as better head coach", White's startling improvement has to count in Mazzulla's favor. Maybe the same improvement would have happened under Udoka, but I doubt it when I recall how tentative White looked during the 2022 playoffs.
Lots of athletes are wired with irrational swagger and confidence. White comes across as more of a normal human in this respect, both for better and for worse. Probably having a hard-ass like Udoka was valuable for certain players on the roster at a certain point in their collective development, but it seems clear that White has benefited from having more of a "players' coach."
With the caveat that Spo's available talent was extremely limited, CJM and Tatum played him like a fiddle this series imo.
That caveat matters. But Joe has to coach against, and the Celtics play against, the actual opposing team, injuries and all. Have to give Joe and the team credit for doing it.
I also give them credit for blowing Miami out in every win. Beating the lesser team is great--not letting them into the game at all is much better (and harder).
To this point, the Celts hit 99% win probability:
game 1 - 3:28 left in Q3
game 3 - 1:26 left in Q2
game 4 - 5:25 left in Q3
game 5 - 8:35 left in Q2
I think I got that correct. That's crazy.
I laughed out loud last night when they showed that the money line was off the board and it was like a few minutes into the third quarter. I believe Scam said he had never seen that before.
Wob put out his Heat Therapy Session tweet thread in the 3rd. Not sure I've seen that before.
https://x.com/WorldWideWob/status/1785841974777725172
I thought Mazzulla was better than the players last night. Aggressive timeouts when they hit dumb lulls, used Kornet more to limit Al's minutes, schemes on D were strong. The offensive issues were mostly from the players missing shots or throwing the ball to the other team.
Yes, Kornet's minutes went from 7:51 in Game 3 to 19:28 last night. He listened to what the Port Cellar wanted him to do! Therefore, he must be coaching well 
And the timeout thing has become such a non-issue at this point that we hardly notice it from him. He takes 'em right about when we'd want him to take them. No more of this "they'll figure it out".
And the timeout thing has become such a non-issue at this point that we hardly notice it from him. He takes 'em right about when we'd want him to take them. No more of this "they'll figure it out".
True though last night he let it go from 15 to 7 or 8 in the 4th without calling one. Not egregious though.Yes, Kornet's minutes went from 7:51 in Game 3 to 19:28 last night. He listened to what the Port Cellar wanted him to do! Therefore, he must be coaching well
And the timeout thing has become such a non-issue at this point that we hardly notice it from him. He takes 'em right about when we'd want him to take them. No more of this "they'll figure it out".
The only time I got a bit annoyed was in the middle of the 4th when Celts were up 98-83 after Jaylens somewhat ill-advised but beautiful turnaround, and then came up empty on a bunch of possessions and Cleveland eventually had the ball down 98-91 with a chance to get it within 5 with about 5 min to go. Watching live it felt like at some point a TO would've helped.
What do you think is the main hesitation behind not trying a small lineup (i.e. Tatum or Tillman at the 5)? Is it the lack of regular season minutes or threat of Mobley that makes them hesitant to try even with Horford's two bad games? I don't necessarily think it's a good idea, but I'm surprised it hasn't been tried.
Ha. That wasnt even a jinx! my bad...had that all written out and then work got in the way before I could hit post. But agree that it wasnt egregious, in real time it just got to me a bit.
Probably because they're already asking so much out of Tatum that they don't want to gas him further by playing the 5. He's playing heavy minutes of high usage basketball. He's already slowing the pace down late as the 4. If you want him to play the 5 he will need either lower usage or fewer minutes. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing some of it earlier in the game, but I'm also confident in Al and Luke to get the job done.
Yeah, he's already limiting his (very effective) drive quantity, probably for energy conservation.
I think it's a combination of never having done it, and thinking they don't need to do it to win the series. I think there's a concern that it would put too much on Tatum's plate (although in a theoretical Tatum-at-the-5 lineup, I think you play Tatum on the wing as a help defender and let Jaylen or Jrue guard the big).
Still, if that lineup induced the Cavs to throw away their offense in favor of dumping the ball to Mobley in the post over and over again, I think that's a win from the Celtics' perspective.
Is there really any other criteria?He listened to what the Port Cellar wanted him to do! Therefore, he must be coaching well
I think that would only apply to the idea of going small against a team that is playing a typical lineup. If the Cavs go small and it works for them, I don't see anything wrong with the Celtics responding in kind. I don't see why Tatum would be less gassed matching up agaisnt the same guy just because Horford/Kornet and Mobley/Thompson are in the game vs out of it.
He's such a psycho. It's awesome. Did he elaborate what those things were exactly?
In the first, third, and fourth quarters, Cleveland was forced to take early timeouts. Knowing the under 3 media timeout would be charged to the Celtics regardless, Joe took timeouts with possession shortly before the 3:00 mark to set up ATOs in all three of those quarters. It doesn't add up to a ton of win probability added, but he's been absolutely maximizing his TO usage this year.
Just read up on the rule. I had no clue the tv timeouts were charged to the teams.
This was posted after the Miami series. I thought Mazzulla also had a pretty good Cleveland series overall, particularly the adjustments to give Mobley more rope in order to tighten up on the outside shooting. Letting Horford defend Garland 1:1 even when they hunt him, to avoid the price of sending help. The pace didn't get as slow in the second half as it sometimes does. A lot of positives.
If I were to quibble, I'd say I thought he missed some very challengeable bad calls early in a few games. It didn't end up mattering, of course (no single decision would have), but that's been a weapon of his all season and I hope Charles Lee gets his mojo back next week. But besides that, very solid job.
Of course, not everyone agrees:
And from the Game 4 game thread, in which we led by 12 with one minute remaining before it finished as a 7-point win:
Can't please everyone, I guess.
To be fair, after that game they did exactly what I was calling for lol. I think Joe is mostly quite good, but he can be late with adjustments.
The charitable version of my criticism is that it's hard to watch basketball in real time.
It's easier than other sports, for sure -- with football, you need to wait for all-22 to really know what was going on, let alone at the time of a play.
Because it's hard to watch it in real time, people fall back on stuff like rotations, timeouts, and "macro micro" things like "are they dropping or switching?"
Most of the useful stuff that Joe and JBB were doing was pretty micro. Here's a good (unfortunately paywalled) article in the Athletic that explains the scheme on Mobley/Garland. It required a lot of micro execution: the idea was to fake a drop, but then have Garland's man immediately get in front of Mobley.
JB did it perfectly, like a fucking ballerina. Some other guys got toasted, some made it work. Overall, it limited 3s and held Cleveland under 100 points in a game where Cleveland shot the lights out from 3.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5500154/2024/05/17/celtics-joe-mazzullas-cavaliers-win-analytics/
I don't think the adjustment was really to "run more PnR with Tatum". It was to have a clearer plan for attacking Garland in high screening action. Tatum was a big part of that, but the real thing was being decisive with how they used DWhite there. Those count as "Tatum PnR", but that's not granular enough to be interesting imo.
It wasn’t just more with Tatum, everyone upped their PnR in games 3-5. Tatum went from 16% of the time to 19%, Jaylen from 10% to 14.4%, Holiday too, which was a clear adjustment I thought.
Tatum averaged 14 more touches in games 3-5 than games 1/2. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say Joe was underutilizing him early in the series.
I'm trying to phrase this right, because I don't necessarily disagree: it's often hard to immediately tap the button on those adjustments without knowing exactly what you are targeting in what the other team is doing. You also have to brief the players on the gameplan so they are doing things differently in a useful way.
Unless the adjustment is really simple (like some defensive ones), you can't really say in the 3rd quarter of game 2 "let's run more PnR, guys!" It's usually going to be something you install between games, and they'll be specific PnRs based on what Cleveland has and what they've shown.
I think a similar thing happened in the Miami series, when they got time between games to figure out exactly how to attack the "bait Jaylen into isos with Herro" thing.
I don't see many (any?) NBA coaches who are consistently able to do tons of useful micro adjustments in-game. Spo is the pinnacle of doing cool micro stuff to disrupt other teams and get an edge, and he usually does it game-to-game, rather than intra-game.
All of this is to say that "make adjustments between games and crush the other teams in 5 games" is about as good as it gets, generally. It took Kerr 3 games to figure out the famous "don't guard Tony Allen" adjustment, and another 3 to figure out the "use Curry's gravity to spam the short roll Draymond" adjustment that finally beat a very depleted Cavs team in 2015.
The PnR numbers? Just following game to game on nba.com, since you can’t break it down by each game on there.
https://www.nba.com/stats/players/ball-handler?dir=A&sort=TEAM_ABBREVIATION
Touches is right here, and that you are able to check by game. Tatum averaged 77 touches in games 1/2, then jumped to 91 the last three games.
https://www.nba.com/stats/players/touches?LastNGames=3&dir=A&sort=TEAM_ABBREVIATION
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I was just basing it on the whole playoffs as of that point. I don’t care about in game adjustments, I just was hoping to see them adjust going forward.
Obviously coaches have way more information than me. Maybe they were trying to keep Tatum fresher, maybe they looked at these two rounds as opportunities to try some different things out. But both eye test and numbers showed the same thing, IMO.
Also, nba.com tracking is good, but it pales in comparison to synergy when it comes to details. I have a lapsed subscription, mostly because I’ve been too lazy lol.
Yeah, I guess my question was "when would they realistically have adjusted faster?"
They whomped Cleveland in Game 1, Cleveland came up with some stuff in Game 2 to counter, and by Game 3 the Cs had the gameplan that finished the whomping of Cleveland. Both teams were in strategic equilibrium at that point: there wasn't anything big left to change. If Cleveland had variance'd their way into a Game 4 or 5 win, that probably just delays the inevitable.
My other point was that "Tatum PnR" is a huge category that isn't really an adjustment. The adjustments led to things that are tracked as Tatum PnR, but "more Tatum PnR" wasn't really implementable mid-Game-2.