Much has been made of the Coach of the Year Award and Joe Mazzulla’s candidacy, including his own comments, which showed how little he cares and how much disdain he has towards the honor, in general.
Despite his typical Joe sentiment and the fact that JB Bickerstaff is the current favorite to actually win the award, Mazzulla is the most deserving coach. It is given out each year based on the coach’s body of work for a specific season, but at a certain point, it’s fair to start looking at an overall resume.
Because the reality of the situation is that Mazzulla has had a historically great start to his head coaching career, he’s on pace to go down as an all-time great, and if he doesn’t take home a COY award soon, it may look very bad when people look back at the history books years from now.
It may still feel like a small sample size, but this is now Joe’s fourth year as the head coach, and he has the highest winning percentage of any coach in NBA history at 72% through the first 322 games of his career, with a ridiculous 233-89 regular season record, which includes the Celtics’ improbable 51-25 mark so far this season.
Small sample, but… pic.twitter.com/nS1dITvTnN
— HoopsHype (@hoopshype) April 2, 2026
Mazzulla pacing to be all-time great coach
Under Joe’s leadership, the Celtics have won 57, 64, and 61 games, and there are six more games for him to add to the 51 they have already achieved this season. That would be a remarkable run for any coach in the history of basketball, but for him to pull it off in his first four seasons, before even turning 38 years old, is amazing.
With this kind of start to his career, you’d think he’d be racking up Coach of the Year awards for ages, but historically, we’ve seen that the voters get numb to consistent greatness. That explains why a coach like Erik Spoelstra has never won the award. And as great as Spo is, and as highly as he’s regarded, he’s won 50+ games in a season just four times in 17 seasons, a number already matched by Joe.
Hopefully, the voters will get this one right, and Mazzulla will get his just due this season, but it’s far from a certainty. But if Joe keeps this up going forward, fans are going to look back years from now and wonder how he started his coaching career like this without becoming a Coach of the Year winner.