Joe Mazzulla won the NBA Coach of the Year award on Tuesday, a nod to the season he steered the Boston Celtics through after a summer that stripped away much of the roster’s continuity. The league said Mazzulla beat out J.B. Bickerstaff and Mitch Johnson for the 2025-26 NBA Coach of the Year award.
The honor lands after Boston finished 56-26 and earned the Eastern Conference’s second seed, even though the Celtics started the season by losing their first three games. They also played most of the year without injured star Jayson Tatum, then lost to the 76ers in the first round of the playoffs, a reminder that the award tracks the regular season more than the finish line.
What made the season stand out was not just the record but the shape of it. Boston lost nearly half its rotation during a cost-cutting summer and entered the year after moving on from Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, Al Horford and Luke Kornet. That left Mazzulla and his staff to rebuild the team around new contributors and younger players who were still learning how to fill regular NBA roles. The Celtics still finished second in offensive efficiency, fourth in defensive efficiency and fourth in net rating, and they won at least 50 games for the fifth straight season. Mazzulla has been the head coach for four of those campaigns.
Brad Stevens, the Celtics’ president of basketball operations, called it “well-deserved recognition” and “a testament to both Joe and his staff.” He said Mazzulla did “a fantastic job building and growing a team” with so many unknowns entering the season, adding that he pours everything he has into competing at a high level while helping players find the best versions of themselves within the framework of a team. Stevens also said Mazzulla leads with an authentic care for the Celtics and everyone he works with — players, coaches and staff.
That staff-first message matched the coach’s own view of the award. In December, Mazzulla said the offseason emphasis was creating a better learning environment after the Celtics lost experience and continuity. He said the goal was to make sure the team’s language and system philosophies were getting across and that players could retain information quickly enough to reach their best version as fast as possible. After the award was announced, he said it belonged to the staff, thanked the people around the program for their daily work and said the trophy should be renamed Staff of the Year.
The timing only sharpened the contrast. Mazzulla had called Coach of the Year “stupid” before he won it, an old line that now reads less like rejection than the kind of dry deflection that often comes from coaches who prefer the work to the praise. Boston’s season still ended in disappointment, but the award captures the part that mattered most in the regular season: a team remade in a hurry still finished near the top of the conference and did enough, long enough, to put its coach alone in the spotlight.
