Anyone who follows the NBA with any sort of regularity knows by now that Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla is an odd cat. To me, he’s odd in awesome ways. The guy supposedly watched “The Town” two to three times a week at one point in his life, and he has real thoughts on how to actually rob Fenway Park, to the point that he scopes out exit points when he’s at Red Sox games. Honestly, the guy is a treasure.
So when Mazzulla made an appearance on Boston radio and was asked what he would change about the NBA, you knew he wasn’t going to give a stock answer. True to form, Mazzulla elaborated on why the NBA should institute power plays after fouls, forcing the offending team to play a man down for a length of time, as in hockey.
Oh, and he also wants to “bring back fighting.”
“The biggest thing that we rob people of from an entertainment standpoint is you can’t fight anymore. I wish we’d bring back fighting,” Mazzulla said on NBC Sports Boston in a manner that certainly didn’t sound like he was trying to be funny. “What’s more entertaining than a little scuffle? How come in baseball they’re allowed to clear the benches? How come in hockey they’re allowed to fight? I don’t understand. I just don’t get why some sports are allowed to clear the benches. They have bats and weapons [in baseball]. We don’t. We have a ball. The other sport [hockey] has one of the hardest playing surfaces and a puck and a stick. And yet we’re not allowed to throw down a little bit?”
Now listen, I’m not sure this is all that great an idea. I think we can all agree on that. But don’t act like there isn’t a part of you that gets fired up with hockey players drop their sticks. NBA fans are almost universally in favor of bringing a certain amount of physicality back to the game. Maybe not circling up and throwing fists, but toughness and competitiveness spilling over into some level of altercation has been happening in sports for years. To Mazzulla’s point, it still happens in other sports. There is a certain charm to it, no?
Of course, there’s a real danger with this. These are big, strong athletes, and obviously you can get really hurt in a real fight (as opposed to the NBA’s tried and true “hold me back” shoving matches). That’s why Mazzulla’s pugilistic desires will never happen.
Once the league had to deal with the reputation hit and PR fallout from the “Malice at the Palace,” anything that even resembles fighting was never again going to be condoned in the NBA. Obviously that’s the smart way to go about this, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not an entertaining thought to imagine a world of hard fouls and occasional throw downs on an NBA floor. Joe Mazzulla simply said what a lot of us have thought quietly. This is a man of the people.