Former Mountaineer makes WVU and NBA history as he coaches the Boston Celtics to the league’s model franchise’s latest championship
Joe Mazzulla has made history ever since he took over the Boston Celtics’ head coaching role in 2022, and he secured the most historic win of his young coaching career Monday night in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
The former Mountaineer guided the top-seeded Celtics to the franchise’s latest NBA championship, downing the Dallas Mavericks 106-88. It’s Boston’s NBA-best 18th league title.
Mazzulla is now the youngest head coach to win an NBA title since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976 and the first former WVU player or coach to win a professional championship as a head coach since Joe Stydahar led the Los Angeles Rams to the 1951 NFL title .
“You get very few chances in life to be great, and you get very few changes in life to carry on the ownership and the responsibilities of what these banners are and all the great people and great players that came here,” Mazzulla told ESPN’s Lisa Salters at midcourt on the trophy presentation stage. “When you have few chances in life, you just got to take the bull by the horns and you got to just own it.”
Boston’s win over Dallas concludes a dominant season in which the Celtics achieved the best regular-season record (64-18) in the NBA by seven games before going 16-3 in the postseason.
“The brilliance of Joe Mazzulla is that he wouldn’t let expectations get in the way,” Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck said on the stage immediately following his team winning the title.
The second-year head coach recorded his 100th regular-season win in his 137th game this February, marking the fourth-fastest route to 100 wins in NBA history. Steve Kerr, Tom Thibodeau and Avery Johnson are the only coaches to reach the mark in fewer games. Mazzulla also holds the highest winning percentage (72.9%) in NBA history, including playoff games, with a 148-55 overall record.
In college, he helped the Mountaineers reach the Final Four in 2010 as a junior guard. He returned to the state of West Virginia later in his career, serving a stint as the head men’s basketball coach at Fairmont State.
