Tom Brady. Patrick Mahomes. And Joe Mazzulla.
Cue up the Sesame Street sing-a-long song voice in your head: Two of these things go together and one them just…
Actually, all three of these notable professional sports names share one common, critical bond and do indeed belong on the same list.
Huh?
Follow along.
Brady is universally now accepted as the greatest football player of all time.
Mahomes is pretty universally accepted as the best player in the NFL today.
And, well, Mazzulla is the head coach of the Boston Celtics.
Huh, again?
For eight straight years from 2011-2018, Brady led Bill Belichick’s Patriots to the AFC Championship game.
For each of the last five seasons, Mahomes has led Andy Reid’s Chiefs to the conference title tilt.
A decent year for Brady and Mahomes saw them reach but lose with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line. A good year earned a spot in the biggest game in all of sports. A great year for the two all-time great QBs landed another oversized gaudy ring on their Hall of Fame fingers.
Despite playing plenty of “meaningful” games from September through early January, for pace-setting championship passers like Mahomes and Brady the football season didn’t really count until they were one of the sport’s final four teams still playing in the postseason.
They set a bar of expectations from themselves that needed more than the Fosbury Flop to be cleared.
Following last week’s Celtics trade for Unicorn 20-plus-point scorer Kristaps Porzingis, Mazzulla most definitely finds himself in the land of Brady and Mahomes.
Sure, the NBA season will tip off in October. Many “big games” will be played in Boston as All-NBAers Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown get back to work with a reinforced roster of support.
But for a Boston basketball team that’s still and yet again chasing banner 18, the season really won’t begin until and when the Eastern Conference Finals jump it up.
The Celtics have been to the conference championship series each of the last two seasons, three of the last four and five of the last seven, with the summer of 2022 trip to the NBA Finals mixed in for good measure.
Fair or not, this coming basketball season is Eastern Conference Finals or bust for Mazzulla in just his second season leading the Boston bench.
Brad Stevens didn’t trade the supposed heart-and-soul, longest-tenured Celtic in Marcus Smart just to shake things up and see how the new mix comes together. Nope. Stevens, just a couple years into his own front office tenure made a move that may just define his President of Basketball Operations reputation, a move to try to put his team over the top for another NBA crown that’s felt close but just out of reach for years now.
Stevens swung for the fences. In NBA parlance he took a long dagger of a three this offseason. He’s attempting to tomahawk dunk on the competition.
And that puts all the pressure in the Green Team world on the 34-year-old inexperienced coaching shoulders of Mazzulla.
A good season won’t be good enough. A good playoff seed won’t even be notable. Winning a postseason series will induce reactions of Now Whats? and Yeah Buts.
For nearly a decade and a half in the NFL, Brady and Mahomes have thrived in the spotlight of expectation that required them to reach the doorstep of a ring annually. It’s a huge part of their generational greatness. They have been elite performers who took their teams to elite levels like it was expected. Because it was.
Now, that’s what’s expected of Mazzulla and the Celtics.
The Boston basketball season will truly begin next June in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Otherwise, it’s not going to be much of a season at all.
And fair or not, Mazzulla will likely be blamed for it.
Good luck, Joe. Now go do your Brady-and-Mahomes best to get the job done.