Joe Mazzulla’s message to his Celtics team heading into the 2024-25 season — his overarching mantra as Boston looks to accomplish something that hasn’t been done in the NBA in six years — can be summed up in one three-letter word:
Yet.
This Celtics squad is nearly identical to the one that bulldozed its way to the NBA mountaintop four months ago, winning 64 regular-season games and losing just three times in the playoffs. Only two players who rode the duck boats through Boston back in July are no longer on the roster, and both resided near the bottom of the depth chart.
Every Celtic who saw meaningful minutes in the NBA Finals will be suiting up in green again this season.
In a recent survey of NBA general managers, 83% of them picked the Celtics to repeat as champions. Sportsbooks feel similarly, pegging the C’s as overwhelming title favorites. The expectations are clear: Boston is, and should be, the team to beat this season.
That’s what Mazzulla expects, too. He knows how talented, deep and playoff-hardened his team is. The Celtics are, quite obviously, a championship-caliber club.
But expecting success and doing what’s necessary to achieve it are two very different things.
“I mean, this team, 2024-2025, is not great yet,” Mazzulla said Saturday after the Celtics’ penultimate preseason practice. “Do we have the potential to be? Yes. … Key word is yet. It’s very important. Do we have great talent? Yes. Do we have great players? Yes. Do we have a great foundation? Yes. So, is this ’24-25 (team) great yet? No, because we haven’t been in a game yet.”
Ensuring his players didn’t “skip steps” was a priority for Mazzulla as Boston prepared for its title defense — a term, by the way, the head coach hates for its implied passivity. He put the Celtics through a grueling training camp that players described as unusually intense and physically exhausing.
Jaylen Brown called Mazzulla — who on Monday said he doesn’t believe in external pressure because “we’re all going to be dead soon” — “a psycho, in a good way.”
There was no easing back in after an abbreviated offseason, because Mazzulla did not want to treat the team like it had just won a title. In fact, he did all he could to eliminate thoughts of last year’s championship, something that likely will become easier after Tuesday night’s ring presentation and banner-raising ceremony.
“The 2024-25 Celtics is not a great team yet,” Mazzulla reiterated. “We have the potential to be. We have the pieces to be. We have the foundation to be. We have to go through the process and get to that point over the course of a season. And I think that humility and understanding that we have to get better is what keeps us (motivated), the process of the mundane fun and coming into work every day. You rely on the character of your players.”
Based on their public comments since the team reconvened last month, the Celtics’ players seem to share their coach’s forward-thinking mentality.
At media day, Jayson Tatum said it “was never just about trying to win one,” a point he also stressed in his interviews for Netflix’s “Starting 5.” One championship is the baseline for greatness, he said — a level all players must reach to truly be considered elite, especially in Boston. But “now it’s just a conversation of, how great are you trying to be? What room or what tier are you trying to be mentioned in when it’s all said and done?”
That’s been a frequent talking point around the Celtics’ facility, according to Payton Pritchard. Asked what it will be like to see Banner 18 hoisted to the TD Garden rafters ahead of the season opener against the New York Knicks, the halfcourt hero quickly pivoted to the new task at hand.
“It’ll be one hell of a night,” Pritchard said. “But then I think it’s, we’ve talked about this: Can we do it again? We’ve got to shift our focus. Greatness is not being able to do it once, but multiple times.”
Transcendent greatness is Boston’s goal this season. And it’s not an unreasonable one. Though no NBA team has won back-to-back titles since the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors — and the last five champs all bowed out before the conference finals the following season — none had the continuity of this Celtics’ squad.
They’re a juggernaut at full strength, and even without Kristaps Porzingis, who’s set to miss at least the first month of the season as he recovers from leg surgery, they’re a nightmare to deal with. The star center missed 37 games last season, including playoffs, and Boston won 31 of them.
Tatum and Brown are All-NBA-caliber players who are squarely in their prime, still ascending and armed with plenty of personal motivation after their respective Olympic slights. Derrick White and Jrue Holiday are elite role players. The likes of Pritchard, Al Horford, Sam Hauser, Luke Kornet and Xavier Tillman give Boston one of the league’s best benches.
The Celtics’ road through the Eastern Conference this season should be tougher, starting with their opening night opponent, the Knicks, who transformed their roster with franchise-shaking trades for Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns. The Philadelphia 76ers also added nine-time All-Star Paul George, who will form a formidable but fragile big three with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. Cleveland, Orlando and Indiana all are young teams on the rise, and Milwaukee can’t be counted out as long as it employs two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Boston also could be hurtling toward a roster-shakeup reckoning with the team up for sale and massive luxury-tax penalties set to kick in a year from now. Keeping this championship core together for 2025-26 could cost upward of $500 million and be untenable for even the deepest-pocketed prospective owners.
That, however, is a tomorrow problem. Today’s Celtics are loaded and, barring injuries, should stay that way until next offseason.
No, they can’t be called great yet. But that’s their one and only target.
“A lot of people can do it once,” Pritchard said. “I know a championship’s hard, but there’s a lot of people who have won one. But winning it multiple times and creating almost, like, a dynasty, that’s hard to do. That’s greatness, and that’s something we’re trying to achieve.”
