Celtics' Joe Mazzulla is logging the miles to earn his players' trust originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
It’s not even officially summer and Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla is piling up the frequent flier miles in his relentless offseason quest to be near his players.
During the first week of June, Mazzulla was spotted in both Omaha, Nebraska, and Lisbon, Portugal, while supporting Baylor Scheierman and Neemias Queta, respectively. That’s roughly 4,400 air miles between the two spots — with no direct flights — and is only the start of Mazzulla’s worldwide travels aimed at nurturing relationships.
For Mazzulla, that shared time is key to getting the Celtics where they want to go next. And that wild itinerary reminded us of something poignant that president of basketball operations Brad Stevens told us right before the 2025-26 season.
“I had a guy that has been around [Mazzulla] working out — he’s been here doing individual work and small group work for a couple of weeks — and he just said, ‘That guy can say anything to me because of the amount of time he spends with me,'” Stevens said. “And I think that that speaks to — you have to build a relationship, you have to get to know people.
“You just don’t get to throw a whistle around your neck and wear a shirt that says, ‘Coach’ and just be able to coach people. You have to really learn to meet them where they are and then hopefully motivate them, or find the intrinsic motivation and motivate them to use their strengths.”
For Mazzulla, that trusts begins with trying to find out what makes a player tick and often examining the roots of their NBA journeys.
In previous summers, Al Horford marveled at Mazzulla’s willingness to trek to the Dominican Republic to help run basketball camps after Boston’s championship season. When offseason signee Chris Boucher mentioned last year that he was returning to Montreal to be baptized, Mazzulla excitedly asked if he could attend.
While the outside world tends to focus on Mazzulla’s unique personality and the odd ways he choses to motivate himself and his team, his players have bought in largely because of his old-fashioned relationship building.
“He is very unpredictable. People see all these other things. But there’s also, I feel, like the caring factor from him, and it’s a real thing,” Horford told us after Mazzulla’s Dominican visit.
“You can see that he cares about his players, he cares about you as a person, and that’s somebody that you can respect. We can rally around him, he’s genuine, and when he speaks, we listen.”
Horford suggested Mazzulla might even go to great lengths to hide that more human side.
“One of the coaches that was [in the Dominican] told Joe that he wanted him to give another session, another practice,” explained Horford. “So, the next day, we go see the president and we have our moment and everything. And then Joe kind of afterwards, we drive separately, we go our separate ways.
“And he went back to the neighborhood in the Dominican, in La Romana specifically, it’s a city there. And he went back and gave — he’s not gonna talk about this, nobody knows this — but he gave like a two-hour clinic to a bunch of kids down there.
“There were no cameras, there was no anything. And he just went down there with the people and just gave a free basketball clinic and just talked about fundamentals of the game. So, it just speaks of the type of great person and leader that he is.”
Mazzulla, who’s been known to wander off into the Costa Rican jungle on his own summer refresh, was spotted working with Scheierman on the Creighton campus, then accompanied Neemias Queta to Portugal to see two of the teams that Queta played for to start his own basketball journey.
Players like Scheierman and Queta both made big strides last season. If the Celtics are to shuffle closer to title contention next season, they might need both players to take another leap.
For Mazzulla, that process starts long before the Celtics even get back on the floor.
