What was motivating the really negative coverage of the Celtics in the May 23 paper? Fire the coach of a team that is still in the playoffs? Greatest sports failure by a team still in the playoffs?
You should be ashamed of this disheartening coverage. It flies in the face of what it is to compete in sports. It confirms that writers are not players.
Now that the Celtics won Game 4, almost hysterically your writers have started talking about the greatest comeback in history while they start to eat crow.
Dan Gregory
Cambridge
If I were part of the Celtics’ ownership, I would ask Brad Stevens, president of basketball operations, about his understanding of maturity in the NBA. It appears he believed the players to be sufficiently NBA-mature and that they did not need an NBA-mature coach (“Mazzulla is out of his league,” Sports, May 23). He believed that, after last year’s performance, the core group now “got it.”
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Maybe Stevens remains insufficiently NBA-mature to understand that the type of players who can successfully coach themselves and their teammates might be counted on one hand (say, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, LeBron James, John Havlicek).
Sure, coach Joe Mazzulla was not ready, so if the Celtics go on to lose this series, he has to go. But maybe ownership also needs to look for a new general manager.
Chris Popov
Concord
