Mazzulla's choice to make a mountain of a molehill in Game 7 remains head-scratcher

Fans, media members, and others were calling for the Celtics to make some adjustments as their season slipped away with a blown 3-1 lead to the 76ers. I wrote multiple times about how I didn’t understand why Joe Mazzulla was abandoning what got him there all season long, giving up on the team’s depth.

It was brutal watching the team fail in the same ways when it seemed like there were available options that could have gone in and made an impact. There were easy fixes that wouldn’t have required reinventing the wheel, and could have potentially changed the outcome in a hard-fought series that came right down to the final seconds of Game 7.

Once Jayson Tatum was ruled out for Game 7, we figured Mazzulla would finally have to leave his comfort zone, lean on his depth a little more, and open up his rotations. But what we didn’t figure, was that Mazzulla would go completely off the grid and make a massive overcorrection by busting out one of the most bizarre lineups imaginable.

With the Celtics’ season on the line, Mazzulla chose to start Luka Garza, Baylor Scheierman, and Ron Harper Jr. alongside Jaylen Brown and Derrick White.

Baffling starting lineup put Celtics in huge early hole

While I would have loved to see each of those three players mixed in at times, they had all been practically out of the rotation, so to ask them all to step in cold and not only play, but start, in Game 7, was a ridiculous ask.

And sure enough, the moment was a little too big, and those guys, who weren’t used to playing with Brown and White, struggled early as Philly jumped out to a 9-0 start and a 30-15 first quarter lead that the Celtics never quite fully recovered from.

Mazzulla put Harper Jr., Scheierman, and Garza in a tough spot

RHJ played the first 4 minutes and was a -7, then didn’t return. Garza played 8 minutes and went -15. I’m not sure what the strategy was here from Mazzulla. We all wanted to see the bench get more involved, but not like this. This was a strange time for a motivational tactic, or to try to catch the 76ers off guard, and either way, it clearly didn’t work.

It’s also hard to say Mazzulla really believed in these guys, as they barely played after their starting stint. Again, I could understand bumping each of their minutes in general. I could even understand one of them being moved into the starting lineup. But to start all three like this was not only bad for the team, it was unfair to those three players.

In the end, Sam Hauser still played 29 minutes, Neemias Queta played 32 minutes, and Jordan Walsh played just 4. The starting lineup was a facade and a misstep, and two days later, it still makes no sense, and was an untimely failed experiment that felt like a massive overreaction to a minor issue, and at least in part, it cost the team their season.

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