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Mazzulla’s Celtics fall just short of making history

MORGANTOWN — The thing that drew me into a career of writing sports was that you were dealing with the real world, a job that was perfect in its imperfection.

You had winners and losers, heroes and goats, in this case we are talking about the lower-case goats not those written out in capital letters meant to signify Greatest of All-Time.

It lived up to all I had ever dreamed it was from the time I was under Sarah Winfrey’s guidance as a high school journalist until Monday when all of a sudden, the climax came out all wrong.

If only it had been fiction, as it seemed to be as Joe Mazzulla had been writing it.

An on-court hero despite an injury that would have rendered far less a man unable to perform while at West Virginia; a coach who started at the bottom of the bottom; a meteoric rise from Glenville to Fairmont to the most legendary of NBA franchises, the Boston Celtics, first as an assistant then thrust into the head coaching role just as the season was to begin.

The plot was all any fiction writer could ask for, even when Mazzulla and the Celtics fell behind 3-0 in the Eastern Division finals against the Miami Heat.

In fiction, you could have written the comeback for the ages, four straight to sweep into the finals.

If a team of dead men could walk out of a cornfield in Iowa, if a magical bat could make an old man young, why could not Mazzulla’s Celtics win those four in a row. They won the first three before the novelist ran out of ink and there was a humiliating 104-83 loss.

Instead of a parade in Boston where they would name a street after him, there were stories hitting the Internet immediately asking whether Mazzulla should be fired.

Sometimes, you see, real life stinks.

All the while, as Mazzulla pressed button after button in the seventh game, you were wishing you could write the ending.

“Get on the phone.” your mind was screaming at you. “Call Beilein. Call Huggins. They’ll think of something.”

You just can’t do that, though.

As the Celtics scored only 15 first-quarter points while going 0-for-10 from 3-point range, many of them wide open shots, you wanted him on that phone with John Beilein, the man who had recruited him to West Virginia.

“Coach,” you would have written if this were your novel, “get Kevin Pittsnogle here, now.”

And, at halftime, Kevin Pittsnogle would come walking into the locker room, the one-time WVU star who Beilein just recently called “the best above 6-10 shooter in the history of the game. Forty-eight percent from 3. Just think about that.”

That was as a WVU freshman, but he was 41% for his career.

If only you could have written him into the novel.

Or Bob Huggins, for whom Mazzulla had played for three years, put him on the other end of the line.

“Huggs,” you’d have had Mazzulla say, “get Huggins here and have him bring ‘Press Virginia’ with him.”

Something was needed on defense, but Press Virginia didn’t come along until after Mazzulla was gone and it hasn’t really come back since.

And besides, Huggins has to be a little low key at this moment.

No, Mazzulla had lived out his own fiction earlier in his career. Now, he was living it again with a different ending.

On the first play of this seventh game Mazzulla’s best player Jayson Tatum had injured his ankle. It swelled as the game went on, just as did the Heat’s lead. Tatum wasn’t himself.

Mazzulla knew about playing hurt heroics. On Huggins’ Final Four team, in mid-tournament, starting guard Truck Bryant broke a bone in his foot and Mazzulla, who was still fighting his way back from a shoulder injury that had kept him from raising his left (shooting) arm above his shoulder and to shoot free throws right-handed, made his first start.

He had taken only 65 shots all season to that point, but he proved the difference in the game, tormenting Kentucky stars John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins all game on defense and scoring a career high 17 points.

This was what the New York Times had to say about his performance:

“Mazzulla, who started his first game of the season, led with emotion and savvy, doing everything from taking charges to battling with Cousins while anchoring the bottom of the zone defense.”

That should have been fiction, not fact, as WVU got to the Final Four, only to lose to Duke as the team’s star, Da’Sean Butler, went down with a traumatic knee injury late in the game.

Injuries … Bryant’s broken foot, Mazzulla’s shoulder, Butler’s knee, then Tatum’s ankle are all part of the real-life story of Joe Mazzulla, one you could write out in fiction.

Those years at WVU with Beilein and Huggins became part of the fabric that is Mazzulla, that were incorporated into the person and coach he was.

From Beilein, what did he learn? Six years ago, on a podcast with Jim Huber, Mazzulla would spell it out.

“Skill development. I think Coach Beilein has always tried to improve. He’s innovative. Every time you would go into his office, he was trying to invent a new player or a drill. He’s got this concept of what drills to apply to each player.

“He’s really inventive in his skill development and his practice planning and I’ve taken a lot to that.”

And from Huggins?

“No. 1, Bob Huggins is very consistent. A lot of times coaches come into a season wanting to play a certain way and if it doesn’t work right away, they panic and change,” he said on that podcast.

“Huggs is who he is and isn’t changing. He’s very consistent in what he wants the players doing every single day. He’s not budging. I think that has a lot to do with his success, his mentality, his consistency in teaching it.”

That is why, almost certainly, when asked in the minutes after the loss to the Heat if his team was too reliant on the 3-point shot and would that have to change, his answer was brief and to the point.

“No,” he said.

Funny, in a way, that in Bill Russell’s first year as Celtics coach, he won 60 games and lost in the Eastern Conference final. Joe Mazzulla won 59 and lost in the Eastern Conference final, yet the two seasons are looked at very differently.

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