Joe Mazzulla wins NBA Coach of the Year after Celtics exceed expectations

Joe Mazzulla won the 2025-26 NBA Coach of the Year award on Tuesday night, giving Boston another marker of how far his program has come from the turmoil that first put him in charge in October 2022. He beat finalists J.B. Bickerstaff and Mitch Johnson for the Red Auerbach Trophy after leading the Celtics to a 56-26 record and the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference.

The case for Mazzulla was built on results and adaptation. Boston played most of the season without Jayson Tatum, who missed the bulk of the year with a torn Achilles tendon, yet still stayed near the top of the East and finished with one of the league’s strongest records. NBA.com noted that the Celtics exceeded expectations all season and that this was Mazzulla’s fourth straight 50-win campaign in Boston, a run that has turned his tenure into one of the NBA’s most durable regular-season operations.

Mazzulla has also changed the shape of Boston’s identity. He signed a multi-year extension in August 2025 after compiling a 182-64 regular-season record and a 33-17 playoff mark over three seasons, numbers that reflect both stability and sustained pressure at the top of the league. His Celtics won the 2024 NBA championship, and the latest award extends a résumé that began when he was elevated from interim coach amid October 2022 upheaval and later kept the job permanently.

That broader arc is part of why the honor carries more weight than a single trophy. The recent Coach of the Year winners include Mark Daigneault in 2024, Mike Brown in 2023, Monty Williams in 2022 and Nick Nurse in 2020, but Mazzulla’s case lands in a different debate about the modern coaching job. In an era when voters often split between scheme innovation, player development and regular-season consistency, Boston’s 56 wins made a strong argument that the safest marker of coaching value is still what shows up in the standings.

Mazzulla did not treat the award as a destination, only another byproduct of a team that kept winning while stars missed time and the roster absorbed the season’s injuries and strain. The vote closed out the league’s end-of-season awards schedule, but for Boston it also underscored the scale of what Mazzulla has built: a title team that still knows how to stack wins, even when the margins are thinner than the trophy case suggests.