Joe Mazzulla is one of the three finalists for the 2025-26 NBA Coach of the Year award. Given how the Celtics’ season started, that should tell you everything about how Boston righted the ship.
The Celtics lost Jayson Tatum to an Achilles injury in the second round of last year’s playoffs. He missed the entire 2025-26 regular season. Boston was supposed to be a play-in team. They finished as a top-four seed.
That is the resume. Mazzulla took a roster missing its franchise player, leaned into Jaylen Brown as a true No. 1, gave Derrick White and Payton Pritchard more responsibility, and managed Kristaps Porzingis’s minutes well enough that he played a career-high 70 games. The Celtics defended at an elite level all season because Mazzulla refused to let the identity slip.
The other finalists are reportedly Mark Daigneault of the Thunder and Mike Brown of the Knicks. Daigneault has the best record. Brown turned New York into a top-two seed in the East. Mazzulla has the best story.
The voting probably comes down to Daigneault, but Mazzulla getting named a finalist is the league acknowledging what Celtics fans already knew. He has grown into the job. The early-career questions about his rotations and his timeouts have largely gone away. The team plays hard. The team plays smart. The team plays the way Mazzulla wants them to play.
Brown was the runaway pick for First-Team All-NBA from the East after his MVP-level regular season. That campaign does not happen if Mazzulla does not redesign the offense around him in October. The pick-and-roll usage went up. The off-ball stuff went down. Brown became a primary creator and shot a career-best percentage from three.
The Celtics still lost in the second round to the Knicks. That is the asterisk. The roster without Tatum had a clear ceiling and they ran into it. But the way they got there, after starting the season as a question mark, is the entire reason Mazzulla is on this list.
Tatum is expected back at some point in 2026-27. The Celtics’ core is intact. Brown signed his super-max extension. Porzingis is healthy. Drew Peterson and Baylor Scheierman both showed up as rotation pieces during the season. The Celtics are not done.
Mazzulla’s stock as a coach has never been higher. The Coach of the Year vote will probably go elsewhere. The bigger reward is what comes next.
If Tatum returns and the Celtics get back to true contender status next spring, this season will look like one of the better coaching jobs of the decade. A franchise lost its best player for a year, and it never spiraled. That is the resume.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
