The 2024-25 Boston Celtics are a rarity in the modern NBA: a reigning champion that was able to keep its roster almost entirely intact.
Thirteen of the 15 players from the Celtics team that hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy are back this season, including Joe Mazzulla’s entire playoff rotation. Unsurprisingly, both oddsmakers and NBA general managers view Boston as the clear favorite to win it all again — something no team has done in back-to-back years since 2018.
Are the Celtics feeling the pressure of those championship expectations? According to Mazzulla, absolutely not.
“Zero. No pressure,” Boston’s notoriously intense head coach said Monday. “We’re all going to be dead soon, and it really doesn’t matter anymore. So, zero pressure. You’re either going to win or you’re not. And when you win, you try to forget about it a week later, and when you lose, you try to forget about it a week later. It’s not pressure. It’s an opportunity. We have an opportunity here for the next few years, however long we’re together — I’ve said this in the past — we have an opportunity to carry the organization forward, to double down on the tradition and the history of what this organization has.
“And what else would you expect than somebody expecting you to win all the time? I wouldn’t want someone expecting me to lose all the time. That would be debilitating. So we have an expectation to win. We have great character, great talent, and we just have to work to maximize that and try to rely on the players to do that.”
In Mazzulla’s eyes, there are two types of pressure: the kind the team puts on itself and the kind created by media hype. The former is important — and certainly present within this Celtics squad, whose players spoke throughout training camp about the desire not to be a one-and-done champion. The latter? To Mazzulla, it’s just noise.
“I just don’t look at it as pressure,” he explained. “A Boston media member or somebody expecting me to win, they don’t have a weapon. They’re not going to come after me if I don’t win. It’s just people saying words, and they don’t mean anything. They’re just words. You’re just saying them because you have to say them. You’re contractually obligated to write a 500-word article afterward. They’re just words. You can’t do anything.
“So it’s just a made-up word. We don’t have a pressure. If we lose, we’re not losing our life. We’re not surgeons. We’re not in the military. We coach basketball for a living. No one’s putting more pressure and ‘expectations’ than we are on ourselves. We have a responsibility. … I ask guys all the time: Would you rather have someone expect you to lose or win?
“If you came up here and were like, ‘Man, I really expected you to lose that game,’ I would be pissed. But if you come up here and are like, ‘You should have won that game,’ it’s like, yeah, that’s what we signed up for. So I think it’s just the perspective of how you look at it and the truth of it.”
The Celtics will be expected to win most of the games they play this season, beginning with Tuesday night’s season opener against the reloaded New York Knicks.
