He boston celtics and Miami Heat they are led by trainers with very different temperaments. Erik Spoelstra, the second longest-serving head coach in the nba, uses your timeouts aggressively when things don’t go as planned. Joe Mazzulla, Boston’s first-year head coach, is much more conservative with his timeouts. He prefers to let his team figure things out on the court so he can save those timeouts for late-game scenarios if he needs them.
Those stylistic differences were on full display in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals. As the Celtics used a quick 7-0 run to cut Miami’s lead to five, Spoelstra called a timeout 94 seconds into the fourth quarter in an attempt to turn the momentum of the streak around. It worked. Boston was never closer than four points the rest of the way.
Mazzulla had several similar opportunities to call timeouts in the third quarter. Boston led the game by nine points at halftime, but the Heat won the third quarter 46-25. Other than a mandatory television stoppage, Mazzulla did not call a single timeout during the Miami onslaught. “I called two in the first quarter”, Mazzulla saying after the game, later explaining that he would have used one in the third quarter if he hadn’t used two in the first. Boston ultimately did not call a timeout of its own accord in the second half until the 3:19 mark of the fourth quarter.
Mazzulla heated up during the third-quarter timeout he was forced to take, and was caught on camera throwing his clipboard in frustration.
For new head coaches, one of the most difficult elements of running a team is game management. There is no way to simulate it ahead of time. Spoelstra has spent the last 15 years mastering every element of the trade. Mazzulla is still learning as he goes, and Game 1 offered him a lesson from the veteran: Save timeouts on him in the first half because he’ll almost certainly need them in the second.