08.25.21Joe Mazzulla’s NBA-Level Positive Framing
Over the past year or two I’ve had the pleasure of working occasionally with Joe Mazzulla. Joe is an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics and this summer was the head coach of their NBA Summer League Team. He also wrote two really great side bars in The Coach’s Guide to Teaching.
The NBA’s summer league is mostly about player development–both in terms of skills and mindsets–but of course everyone wants to win.
You can see Joe steering his players focus to the long term habits of success in this amazing video shot at a time out during the summer league championship game. It’s an exceptional example of using language to frame challenges positively and build productive mindsets.
As the clip opens Joe tells players in the huddle that “the whole point of summer league is to gain experience in hard situations.” Yes, it’s a challenge. That’s a good thing. It’s your opportunity to learn to be a professional. Embracing the difficult moments is why you’re here and how you grow. The (growth) mindset of an athlete at the elite level has to be: oh good, a difficult situation in which to test myself against the best.
“You’re playing against other great NBA players,” Joe continues, “Now you have to have ownership. If you let him get going, you’ve got to shut him down. It’s a great opportunity….” I love that language. A challenge is an opportunity to better yourself. That’s the mindset. Even in the midst of the championship game. It’s a beautiful example of a coach focusing on the long-term for his players.
Joe spoke more about this when I asked him about the clip. The Celtics had won their first four games and were now in the final. “At that timeout I felt like it was the first sign of adversity we’d hit during summer league. As much as we wanted a championship I felt our guys were so results oriented. I tried to shift their minds back to the process, to what summer league was about.” That included developing the ability to focus on “what was going wrong for us and how we could change it,” which is to say taking ownership and relishing the chance to do so.
I want to note here that having watched a few of Joe’s summer league practices, his emphasis on being able to ‘shut players down’ is not something he is simply players they have to know how to do. He’s taught its many pieces and they’ve practiced it. Over and over. He is focusing on the psychological side of one of the two or three technical things he’s emphasized most and preparing them to trust and use what they know, rather than telling them they have to know how to do something without embracing the responsibility himself of showing them how. “The psycho-social is always with us as coaches”, Dan Abrahams said to me recently. But it’s most useful to talk about mindset after we’ve done our homework as coaches on the teaching side.
The last thing Joe says is my favorite though. It’s a great example of talking aspirations (part of Positive Framing). “Every one of you guys is going to have to check into an NBA game and guard somebody…so let’s go.” He’s connecting his feedback to their aspirations… . It’s a reminder that he is pushing and challenging them because he understands where they are trying to go. Because of that even when he is telling them to step up the message that he believes in them is clear.
The ‘positivity” in Positive Framing, I wrote in the 3.0 version of TLAC, is “the delivery of information
students [or athletes] need in a manner that motivates, inspires, and communicates our belief in their capacity.” That positivity so clear, even when Joe is pushing players to be better.
