Kendrick Perkins Blasts Celtics’ Joe Mazzulla In Strange Fashion

Joe Mazzulla came under plenty of scrutiny during his first season as the head coach of the Boston Celtics.

There hasn’t been much to criticize Mazzulla or the Celtics about this season with Boston holding an NBA-best 32-10 record at the midway point of the campaign.

But following a narrow 102-100 defeat to the reigning champion Denver Nuggets on Friday night, which was the first loss on the parquet floor for Boston this season, former Celtics big man Kendrick Perkins called out the coach for his approach.

“They have two Joe Mazzullas,” Perkins said following the game on ESPN’s “NBA Countdown,” as transcribed by MassLive’s Souichi Terada. “They have the one that got the philosophy of we’re going to get up more 3s than you. When they hit them, he looks great. Then you have the other Joe Mazzulla, who just stands over there, and you wonder. If you take his brain out and you put it in a bird, the bird is going to start flying backward. You got that Joe Mazzulla.

“You know why I say that? It’s because he doesn’t get his guys easy looks. Time and time again, we kept saying, attack the paint. You have so many guys that are great at cutting. They cannot continue to play AAU style basketball all the time. You gotta have sets.”

There’s no doubt that Mazzulla ball is all about jacking up 3-pointers, even if they aren’t falling. The Celtics hoisted up 44 of them against the Nuggets, hitting just 14.

It also seemed that whatever Mazzulla diagramed in the huddle in the waning seconds didn’t work, either. The Celtics called two timeouts in the final 13.1 seconds of regulation and didn’t even get a shot up after the first timeout. Boston ended up settling for a tough fadeaway jumper from Jayson Tatum as time expired, which the Celtics star admitted he rushed.

The Celtics arguably are the most talented team in the league with a championship-worthy roster taking the floor. But some, like Perkins, see Mazzulla as holding the Celtics back.

And the spotlight certainly will be on Mazzulla more if he has any hiccups the rest of the season, especially in the playoffs.