Last Saturday, a reporter asked Sam Hauser of the Boston Celtics how coach Joe Mazzulla is different from other coaches he's played for.
"I would just say he's like got a unique approach to the game," Hauser said. "He pulls things from, like, soccer teams, pulls things from killer whales and how they go about finding food and prey, things like that, and he ties it into the game of basketball."
It is no secret that Mazzulla loves and studies soccer. The sport has informed how Mazzulla sees basketball, particularly in terms of the transition game and creating advantages.
Killer whales, though? That was new.
Unfortunately, when a reporter asked Hauser to expand on that part of his answer, the reserve forward said, "I'll let him. I don't really know how to describe it." But that wasn't the end of the story. In a feature published Tuesday, Robert O'Connell of the Wall Street Journal got some answers.
To Mazzulla, it's all about teamwork. Killer whales, aka orcas, hunt in pods, circle their prey and coordinate their attacks. The Celtics watched the highly intelligent hunters work as a collective unit.
"It could be anything," Boston guard Derrick White said after Game 2, per the WSJ. "A lot of ocean, a lot of nature. He loves that predator-prey lifestyle."
Mazzulla also showed the players clips of a cackle of hyenas killing a wildebeest.
"Man, was it hard to watch," center Luke Kornet told the WSJ. "I'll tell you what, Mother Nature…"
After taking a moment to ponder what the team was supposed to take away from the video, Kornet said, "It was really about working together and trying to bring the enemy to a standstill."
This isn't terribly different from what Kornet said about the Celtics watching soccer clips. He used the phrase "it can just look beautiful" in the soccer answer, though, and it sounds like the hyenas-versus-wildebeest scene was anything but.
Mazzulla, who went with MMA as his basketball parallel before Boston's Game 3 victory on Wednesday -- he said wanted to show that "the closer you think you are to beating someone is the closer you are to getting your ass kicked" -- is a creative coach, both in terms of his X's and O's and, clearly, his motivational techniques. I'm not going to say that the Celtics are one win away from a championship because they've seen killer whales and hyenas on the hunt, but they sure have been more tied together on both ends than the Dallas Mavericks in this series. Maybe something seeped in.
