The Garden janitorial staff are going to find it in a trash can.

his comments after winning it will be some hilarious unhinged shit though

like maybe he mentions previous winners all got fired and if they want to fire him they’ll do it over his dead body

Mazulla agrees.

The award is basically a heads up notice of being fired lol

Yes but how else are the talking heads supposed to glaze spoelstra throughout the regular season??? 

It’s basically the ‘this team overachieved award’

If okc breaks the record though I don’t see a way in which SGA and mark dagnabit don’t win mvp and coty

Pistons coming out of nowhere? They improved by 30 games last year with mostly the same core group, went 44-38, and took the Knicks to 6 in a very competitive playoff series. They might be a bit surprising atop the East, but there were plenty of indicators that they were coming.

Boston in 3rd with the 5th-best net rating in the entire NBA is legit shocking. People expected them to be a high lottery team. It’s quite a bit different from Detroit relative to expectations.

Wins above Vegas projections (while still winning/making the playoffs) is like 85% of the award.

I will defend the award on the basis that there’s loads of incredible coaches doing incredible jobs and these seasons are all too different to have it stick to a set formula.

Same with MVP and thats why I think it would be cool for there to be 2 awards for all this stuff. East and West MVPs/COTY/DPOY. Just use the East/West thing as an excuse to give more recognition. I think more recognition would overall be a Net Positive traditions be darned.

If its close the Boston media mafia will propel him to victory ala Smart

Wtf lol

After a slow start, past few weeks they’re on a tear that includes beating all the best East teams including the Pistons and Knicks, BUT yeah OP is either nuts or phrased it poorly.  

A more defensible claim might be “playing like” the best East team right now

Took a few weeks to adjust to losing half of their rotation and having to develop a ton of new players. Now those players are playing great and the Celtics have their rotation figured out. I will go even farther and say that the only two teams I’m confident are better than the Celtics in the league are the Thunder and Nuggets. I think that they would be 50-50 in a playoff series against any other team. If Tatum returns and is at 80% and the Celtics trade Simons for an upgrade, then the Celtics will be able to contend again.

That almost never matters for COTY, especially when it’s with a team that just won the chip.

COTY is mainly for overachieving teams.

By that logic, why wasn’t Mazzulla the favorite the year they won the title and no other team was close to them? What OKC is doing is insane obviously but the Celtics are winning with a considerably less talented roster

I’m here for it, but I think there’s a high chance that he’s crazy enough for the curse to not wanna go near him

would pave the way for Coach Brad to make a comeback

… are you serious? It’s not about “losing salary cap”, and I’m not sure why you would use quotation marks when OP never said that. It’s about not having valuable players on the court and having low-paid replacements (who are typically poorer players) instead.

They moved Kristaps Porzingis for Georges Niang who they flipped for RJ Luis Jr who they cut. They traded Porzingis for nothing

Jrue Holiday was moved for Anfernee Simons. Decent bench piece, but not a huge impact player on winning games

They let Horford and Kornet walk and replaced them with Luka Garza and Chris Boucher (who have both been phased out of the rotation) and promoted 4th string Center Neemias Queta to the starting position.

So yes they are not on the team but they didn’t try to replace them at all. They cut the salary and said let’s work with what we’ve got.

They are winning games because Brown is playing like a top 10 player, White finally found his shot, and the development of Jordan Walsh, Josh Minott and Hugo Gonzalez.

They are 15-9 on pace for 50+ wins. Absolutely nobody was saying they were a top 4 team in the East before the season started but if that’s where they end up, they will have exceeded expectations.

Which is exactly what Coach of the Year is about. It’s never about the best coach, it’s about the coach that most outperformed their expectations. That’s a big part why Spo has never won it, because people always expect him to be good.

We could just say “he lost 3 of 5 starters and then he lost the other extra starter who usually played in KP’s place and THEN he lost the back up to KPs back up who started when both of those guys couldn’t play” if that suits you.

The team on paper got markedly worse in the offseason, and he still has them playing well. Its not hard to understand.

See this is the problem with this dumb award - the narrative for what constitutes COTY changes constantly.

You want to give it to Daigneault for being the best team this year, but then why did Daigneault win it over Mazzulla two seasons ago when Mazzulla coached the Celtics to the best team/record in the league by a mile?