Joe Mazzulla didn’t try to dress it up as “just business.” After Boston completed four trades in the days leading into this week’s deadline, the Celtics coach framed the roster churn the way people inside locker rooms actually feel it: as a disruption of lives, not just a reshuffling of minutes.
“It’s the time of year where you spend time worrying about the person more than the player,” Mazzulla said, turning the conversation away from cap sheets and matchups and toward the uncomfortable human math that arrives every February.
Joe Mazzulla on the Celtics trading four players this week:
“It’s the time of year where you spend time worrying about the person more than the player.”
“We live in an evil world… unfortunately, sometimes you get rid of great people, but you get good people back, right? And… pic.twitter.com/23V3n78zfv
— Noa Dalzell 🏀 (@NoaDalzell) February 6, 2026
The Celtics’ week was busy. Boston’s headline move sent guard Anfernee Simons to the Chicago Bulls in exchange for center Nikola Vučević. They also moved Chris Boucher (to Utah), Josh Minott (to Brooklyn), and Xavier Tillman Sr. (to Charlotte), a sequence of deals widely reported as part of a broader effort to reshape the roster and finances at the deadline.
From the outside, it’s easy to reduce that list to on-court archetypes: a scorer, a stretch-ish big, a young wing flyer, a versatile frontcourt defender. Inside the building, though, those names are routines. They’re carpools, dinner plans, the familiar face in the next locker stall, the family connections that form when an NBA season turns into a traveling neighborhood.
That’s why Mazzulla’s most striking line wasn’t about fit. It was about fallout.
“We live in an evil world… unfortunately, sometimes you get rid of great people, but you get good people back,” he said,
acknowledging the moral whiplash of a system that can be both professionally logical and personally brutal in the same phone call. He didn’t stop at the usual
“it’s hard, but we move on.” He pointed directly at the collateral damage: “The more you can focus on the relationship aspect and the people and their wives and their kids and how everyone’s impacted by that.”
That candor matters because teams rarely talk that way in public, even if everyone in the room understands it. Trades don’t just remove a rotation piece; they reset a support system. New teammates arrive needing to learn terminology and tendencies, but also needing to find their place socially, where to sit on the plane, who to lean on in a new city, how to fold their family into a new rhythm. The outgoing players, meanwhile, are asked to pivot instantly. often midseason, sometimes mid-road trip, while explaining to children why friends and schools and routines can disappear overnight.
Boston will be judged, as always, by what the deadline means in May and June: whether Vučević’s skill set expands the Celtics’ options, whether the remaining depth holds up, whether the locker room stays cohesive through the turbulence. But Mazzulla’s comments were a reminder that “culture” isn’t a slogan you hang in a practice facility. It’s something you protect when the league forces you to be transactional.
