BOSTON — After the Celtics beat the Wizards, a common theme popped up when it came to the C’s. Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla compared his team to the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie, where part of the plot revolves around multiple versions of Spider-Man showing up. And in an interesting twist, Mazzulla compared his team to that movie.
“Ever seen Spider-Man? Into the Spider-Verse?” Mazzulla asked. “There was like 20 different Spider-Men? That’s like our team. … Success is going to look different each and every night, and I think the guys are doing a good job of understanding what that balance is, and as long as the process towards how we’re going about attacking the other team is right, and it fits with what’s best for the team, then it’s just executing.”
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Mazzulla’s words seemed to reach his players as Jayson Tatum brought up the Spider-Man connection unprompted after the victory. While the Celtics came away with the 133-129 over the Wizards, it wasn’t an all-around crisp effort. They gave up 71 points in the first half as the C’s had to climb out of the deficit. Still, there were positives as they outscored the Wizards 36-16 in the third quarter.
“They had 71 points in the first half, so we obviously needed to pick up the intensity on the defensive end in the second half,” Tatum said. “We had to have some Spider-Man instincts, be all over the place on defense. That was a little extreme but he was uplifting. It’s a long game but I think that third quarter kind of sparked the run.”
It wasn’t quite just Mazzulla’s words as he also cracked a joke during halftime. He said he showed the team roughly 10 transition points that were controllable and had to do with effort. Other than that, Mazzulla said he tried to crack some jokes to ease the tension. He couldn’t exactly say what the jokes were since they were inappropriate, but the effort was there.
Mazzulla appears to enjoy his film as his “The Town” fandom has been well-documented. This time he went with Spider-Man to get his point across. And it appears to be working as the Celtics came back to get the win. Now they’ll look to lock down for the final three games before the All-Star break before getting a week off.
“I think tonight was good,” Tatum said. “Continue to find ways to win. maybe we don’t shoot the ball as well as we want to in the first half, but things aren’t going our way and it feels a lot worse than it is and we look up and we are only down two in the third quarter. Joe told us one of the timeouts in the third quarter, somebody tell a joke or somebody laugh or smile. We put so much pressure on ourselves that we gotta get back to remember to have fun in those moments.”
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