Joe Mazzulla has never coached like a man who believes in “momentum” the way everyone else uses the word. If anything, his Celtics tend to treat a bad first half as data, a messy sample size that can still point to a win if the inputs are controllable.
That mindset went viral after Boston’s comeback win over Miami on Thursday, when Mazzulla revealed what he told his team while they were down 21 points.
“I looked at them like, ‘man, we’re in a great spot. It should be 35 or 40… Only down 21 shooting 5% from 3 knowing there was about 20 possessions we could control,’” Mazzulla said, framing the deficit less like danger and more like opportunity.
Joe Mazzulla told the Celtics they were in a ‘great spot’ when down 21 to the Heat 💀
“I looked at them like ‘man, we’re in a great spot. It should be 35 or 40… Only down 21 shooting 5% from 3 knowing there was about 20 possessions we could control” pic.twitter.com/jYBtemtfMM
— Heat Central (@HeatCulture13) February 7, 2026
The quote sounds like Mazzulla performance art until you pair it with what actually happened. The Celtics rallied from a 21-point halftime hole to beat the Heat 98–96, erasing a nightmarish early stretch and flipping the game with a dominant third quarter run. Jaylen Brown led Boston with 29 points, Payton Pritchard added 24, and Derrick White chipped in 21 as the Celtics extended their win streak to five.
Mazzulla’s logic was brutally simple: if the Celtics were that cold from three and still within striking distance, then the scoreboard wasn’t reflecting how much of the game they could still influence. In his view, a 21-point deficit built on extreme shooting variance isn’t automatically a crisis; it’s a reminder that regression and execution can coexist. Control the possessions you can control, and the math has a chance to meet you halfway.
It’s also a very specific kind of Celtics-era confidence. Boston’s identity is built around taking, and making, a ton of threes, so a first half where nothing falls can look like a horror movie. Mazzulla’s message essentially flipped the fear into fuel: if this is the floor, imagine what happens when the shots normalize and the details sharpen. In other words, if it “should be 35 or 40,” then down 21 is survivable, provided the next 24 minutes look nothing like the first 24.
