Zolak & Bertrand: Joe Mazzulla on what Celtics need to do to win the NBA Finals
Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla joined Zolak & Bertrand ahead of Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night, and shed some light on what his team will need to do in order to close the deal and take home the championship:
If the Celtics win the NBA Finals, it will be because the team did _______ :
“The same thing we’ve done the entire playoff, you know, focus on the margins, focus on the things that matter the most. We’ve talked. About all year like, there’s no difference between a regular season game and a playoff game, outside of obviously the ramifications, but the details, the execution, the mindset, the toughness, like all the things that go into winning. Those things are the same, and the team that plays the hardest, the team that’s the toughest, the team that makes the most plays, is the team that wins. We just have to be in that mind frame to kind of do that for however long it takes.
“I think you have to have an idea of what you want to do. Going into each game, you expect the expected. Things are going to go a certain way. Those things are going to happen, but you don’t know. We didn’t know we were going to be in the situation we were in, in Game 1 with Indiana, we didn’t know what Game 3 and 4 were like. And I think the best thing this team has done all year is we just haven’t played with an expectation of things are going to go a certain way. We just kind of stay focused on the details and whatever opportunity or problem was presented to us, we try to take advantage of.”
LISTEN: Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla joins Zolak & Bertrand