Sports

Mazzulla Called Coach of the Year “Stupid” in March. He Won It Last Night.

By Mike Harper · May 27, 2026

In March, a reporter asked Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla what he thought about the NBA Coach of the Year award. He said it was stupid.

“I think it’s a stupid award. I think it should be coaching staff of the year.”

On Tuesday night, Mazzulla was named the 2025-26 NBA Coach of the Year, winning the Red Auerbach Trophy for leading the Boston Celtics to a 56-26 record despite losing star forward Jayson Tatum for a significant portion of the season. He beat Detroit Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff for the second consecutive year and San Antonio’s Mitch Johnson in third. He accepted it the way he said he would — by immediately redirecting credit to everyone around him.

“The long nights, the trips, game plans, the video guys that are clipping up the film and coding it, the assistants who are putting in the game plan, I think there’s so much that goes into winning one game.”

The Celtics are not in the NBA Finals. They lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Cleveland Cavaliers — a series that produced the most viral coaching criticism of the year before Barkley’s vocabulary lesson to the Cavaliers mooted the conversation. Mazzulla’s teams have gone 238-90 in four regular seasons — the highest winning percentage among active head coaches in NBA history at .726. His Celtics won the championship in 2024.

This year, they didn’t. And the internet had thoughts about that.

“This award should be done after the Finals, Mazzulla blew a 3-1 lead and won, lmaoo,” one commenter wrote on ESPN’s announcement. Another: “And they are where in the playoffs? Oh wait. They lost in the first round.” A third: “J.B. Bickerstaff got robbed.”

Bickerstaff led the Detroit Pistons — who finished the 2023-24 season with the worst record in NBA history at 14-68 — to a 48-34 record this year and their first playoff appearance since 2019. That turnaround is the case for Bickerstaff. The argument for Mazzulla is that he held together a defending champion through months of injury disruption involving his best player and still produced the second-best record in the East.

At 37, Mazzulla is the youngest Coach of the Year winner since Phil Johnson in 1974-75. He is the first Celtics coach to win the award since Bill Fitch in 1980. He will be focused on the offseason — and on figuring out how to make a team that went 238-90 over four regular seasons go further than the first round next spring.

The award he called stupid is on his résumé now. He’s right that his staff deserved it too. He’s also the one who has to defend it next year.