Celtics
“If you want to talk about robbing the league of entertainment, what’s more entertaining than a little scuffle?”
Joe Mazzulla … hockey guy?
Based on the Celtics head coach’s latest musings, it seems like he wants some of the rules on the ice to carry over to the hardwood.
During his weekly appearance on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s “Zolak & Bertrand”, Mazzulla pitched the idea of incorporating power plays into basketball.
“Basketball is one of the only sports that doesn’t have a power play,” Mazzulla said. “Let’s say you get a technical or let’s say you get a take foul, you get the one shot, but you’re not really rewarded for that, because if you miss it, you don’t get the reward for the take foul. There should be like a power play where, on a take foul, on a technical, you have to play five-on-four for five seconds or three passes.”
When Bertrand noted that a basketball power play could see one team down a player for an entire possession as part of the advantage, Mazzulla offered up his own interpretation of how the rules could be carried out in basketball.
“I think that might be a little extreme,” Mazzulla said of Bertrand’s possession-long advantage. “But I think we should institute power plays where, instead of taking the ball out on the side, if you commit a foul, the guy goes to the other side of halfcourt, and he can’t leave the halfcourt circle until like three seconds.”
But Mazzulla went a step further when it came to bringing hockey’s DNA into basketball. For Mazzulla, the absence of on-court confrontation is sorely missed in the NBA.
“The biggest thing that we rob people of from an entertainment standpoint is, you can’t fight anymore,” Mazzulla stressed. “We should bring back fighting. If you want to talk about robbing the league of entertainment, what’s more entertaining than a little scuffle?
You get to go to a baseball game — how come in baseball they’re allowed to clear the benches? How come in hockey they’re allowed to? I don’t understand.”
This is far from the first time that Mazzulla has expressed his support for more physicality in basketball.
After the Celtics and Heat got into an on-court kerfuffle during the playoffs last season, Boston’s head coach was left wanting more.
“I was kind of excited about the whole situation. So I enjoyed watching it,” Mazzulla said in April after Jaylen Brown and Caleb Martin exchanged words after Martin delivered a hard foul against Jayson Tatum.
While the NBA has not shown any interest in ushering in brawls as part of their game, Mazzulla stressed Tuesday that basketball should be the ideal medium for athletes to throw hands.
“I just don’t get why some sports are allowed to clear the benches,” Mazzulla said. “They have bats and weapons. We don’t, we just have a ball. I mean, the other sport has one of the hardest surface playing instruments in a puck and sticks, and yet we’re not allowed to throw down a little bit?”
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