Jaylen Brown has been in the NBA for eight years. He’s a three-time All-Star, a one-time All-NBA player, and won three trophies last season—Eastern Conference finals MVP, NBA Finals MVP, and The Larry O’Brien. The 27-year-old has no shortage of league experience, yet after finally accomplishing a lifelong goal of winning a ring, he and the rest of the Celtics have been swatted right back down to earth.
“Probably one of the tougher training camps, first two days, that I've probably had,” Brown said. “In terms of intensity, conditioning level, physicality, defensive warrior-type mentality. So, I think it'll be good for us.”
If the Celtics are a roller coaster reaching its apex, Joe Mazzulla is the downslope, ready to bring them crashing down. If they are a colony of bees soaring in the wind, Mazzulla is the windshield wiper.
Training camp is designed for Celtics to forget the past
An offseason full of exhilaration came to a grounding halt as soon as the players stepped back into the Auerbach Center.
“Obviously, this is a different stage, but my high school coach, we won four straight in high school, and he used to kind of say a similar thing: Every year is a whole different year,” said Payton Pritchard. “A whole different team. So, you do have to detach from it, and it's a new journey.
“You always remember it, and you always have that. If you look up in 2024, that was us. But if we want to do it again, you got to detach and you got to repeat that. So, same mindset. It's the same journey that we went through last year.”
Winning a championship is one of the most challenging feats in basketball. But winning a second is even more impossible. There have been 77 years of NBA basketball, and only 13 teams have won back-to-back titles.
It hasn’t happened since the Golden State Warriors did it in 2017 and 2018. That makes six straight years of new champions. The Celtics want to break that mold.
And it all starts in training camp.
“At the end of the day, whether we won or lost , if we're standing up here at this point, the goal is to win,” Mazzulla said at Media Day. “So, I mean, whether we would have lost last year, our goal would be to win a championship this year.
“So, I think just clearly stating we want to win a championship every single year. That's the goal. That's the standard. That's the expectation. So, what happened in the past really doesn't change when we step foot in the building on this day.”
Mazzulla did everything in his power to prepare the Celtics for a title run last season. But this year presents new challenges, and his response has been to ramp up the intensity.
In order to avoid a potential championship hangover, Boston must trick themselves into forgetting about their past successes. The past is a shoddy railing, and leaning on it will only lead to falling.
So, instead of maintaining greatness, Mazzulla is taking things a step further.
“Hard day. Tough day. Again, I got traded last year, and I think I missed the first day, and I wish I would have missed the first day this year, too,” Jrue Holiday joked after Boston’s first practice. “Hard days. Obviously, we want to come back this year and do it again. This is where it starts.”
It’s no coincidence that Mazzulla is implementing what may very well be the toughest Celtics training camp in a decade. At the very least, it ranks toward the top of Brown’s eight years in the league. Everything the Celtics are doing is intentional.
That intention is to win, and everyone is on board.
“It's not really a response,” Mazzulla said when asked how the players have reacted to tough practices. “They're the ones that set the tone. So, the way they compete, the way they approach practice, the way they approach getting better, it's not a response. They're setting the tone for what they want the environment to be like.”
The Celtics will raise Banner 18 into the rafters on Opening Night. But as their eyes latch on to the swaying symbol of last year’s greatness, their sights will slowly drift to the empty space next to it.
Because that’s what they’re chasing.