Celtics\u2019 Payton Pritchard Makes Bold Prediction on Jayson Tatum Future<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI mean, I think it\u2019s the closest thing to a 2-on-2 situation that you have to communicate,\u201d Mazzulla said. \u201cIt\u2019s a read. You have to read the angle of where it\u2019s being put at. You have to read the angle of your teammate. You have to be able to get through a 2-on-2 situation. That\u2019s a lot of what the game is. You\u2019re in 2-on-2, 3-on-3 situations. Very rarely are you in a 5-on-5 situation, maybe if you\u2019re switching everything at the end of the game. But the game is a constant ecosystem of small 2-on-2s, 3-on-3s, and being able to create those an advantage and a disadvantage.”<\/p>\n
\u201cSo those 2-on-2 games create that. They test your reaction time. They test your ability to communicate. They test your ability to create angles. So I think those things, it\u2019s another way to simulate what you\u2019re going through on every possession of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mazzulla went on to cite a keep-away exercise in soccer workouts, the \u201crondo\u201d drill, employed by one of his favorite coaches, Pep Guardiola, as another useful team-building exploration designed to build out similar skills to Spikeball.<\/p>\n
\u201cRondos in soccer are probably one of the easiest ways to create a bunch of different stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cGame-like situations, joy, teamwork \u2013 different situations, whether it\u2019s offensively or defensively. We can\u2019t really do that because our guys are probably inept from a soccer standpoint, but I think Spikeball is the next-closest thing to a rondo-type situation that you could be able to do. So however many ways you could test the communication and the reads of everything that\u2019s going on in the game, (we) try to find ways to do that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Per Cox, Boston’s strength and conditioning team chose the two-man groups this time. Jaylen Brown played with third-year wing Jordan Walsh, Queta joined second-year swingman Baylor Scheierman, Simons was paired with top rookie draft pick Hugo Gonzalez, Garza suited up alongside two-way rookie signing Max Shulga, and veteran sharpshooter Sam Hauser and played with another two-way rookie, RJ Luis Jr.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur strength staff does a great job of helping to come up with that, so they kind of take ownership of the warmup stuff,\u201d Mazzulla said. \u201cSo they have a lot of other good ideas, and then they do a lot of the team stuff too. They\u2019re important because they see individual dynamics when there\u2019s eight guys lifting in the weight room every day. So they have a good understanding of what interactions with the guys are \u2013 who needs to be around each other and who flocks to each other.”<\/p>\n
For more news and notes on the Boston Celtics, visit\u00a0Boston Celtics on SI<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2025-26 Boston Celtics figure to look quite different than they did in 2024-25. Boston general manager Brad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-203972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}