Blowout win? Career night? Doesn’t matter to Joe Mazzulla.
As the Celtics were salting away a [136-107 waxing of the Washington Wizards](https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/11/05/jaylen-brown-scorches-wizards-as-celtics-snap-losing-streak/) on Wednesday night that featured standout performances from Josh Minott and Neemias Queta, Mazzulla took both players to task for blowing defensive assignments.
For Queta, it was failing to hustle out to contest an Alex Sarr 3-pointer with 8:29 remaining and Boston up 111-84. For Minott, it was lackadaisical effort on a Malaki Branham layup with 3:54 to play in a 24-point game.
Both plays triggered the same response: a Celtics timeout and an earful from the head coach. His message was clear.
“You can’t let up,” Queta said. “You had three great quarters. The team is relying on me to keep playing that hard and not having those mental breakdowns. Just trying to get the best out of me.”
Minott described his encounter as Mazzulla “very energetically telling me what I did wrong.”
“He just wanted to push me,” Minott said. “That’s it. I was messing up defensively. That’s really it.”
Both players said they welcome that kind of hard coaching from Boston’s notoriously intense bench boss, who knows his team’s margin for error is slimmer after it lost Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, Luke Kornet and the injured Jayson Tatum this offseason.
“We never let up, bro,” Minott said. “… It ain’t no 30-point let-up. Hell nah. He was coaching me for the future. We understand that. Maybe the game is necessarily, I would consider, won by then, but we’re working for the future, man. There’s never a let-up. Now we’re using that time as a lesson for the future, and that’s what he was expressing to me.”
Before their late-game lessons, Queta and Minott both posted big numbers against the lowly Wizards, who took a 14-point first-quarter lead but caved after halftime.
Queta tallied 15 points, 12 rebounds, five assists, one block and one steal in his fourth career double-double, and he didn’t miss from the field, going a perfect 7-for-7.
The 7-footer became Boston’s starting center by default this summer — he was the next man up behind Porzingis, Horford and Kornet, and the team’s only frontcourt additions were veteran-minimum players — but he’s exceeded expectations thus far.
Despite the 4-5 Celtics’ inconsistency this season, Queta’s 19.3 net rating is fourth-best among all NBA players who are averaging at least 20 minutes per game.
“We will continue to (hold Queta to a high standard), because he has a lot of potential to be great,” Payton Pritchard said. “We need him. We need his presence down low, his rebounding, his shot-blocking, and obviously he shows flashes of doing things offensively that could be really great for us. He’s a young player still, and he’s still growing, so we’re going to hold him to a high standard.”
Minott, in his sixth game as the Celtics’ starting power forward, set a career high with 21 points on 8-of-12 shooting. He skied for dunks — four of them, including a pair of emphatic alley-oops that bookended halftime — and drilled three 3-pointers on six attempts to go along with his five rebounds and three steals. Boston also played him as a small-ball five for stretches, preferring that look for most of its non-Queta minutes after the first quarter.
Defense, rebounding and spacing are Minott’s stated priorities, but he’s shown glimmers of offensive upside that only occasionally surfaced during his three seasons as a Minnesota Timberwolves reserve. The Celtics are 4-2 since Mazzulla moved the 6-foot-8 sparkplug into the top unit.
“He’s huge for us,” said Jaylen Brown, who scored 35 points in the win and assisted on two of Minott’s slams. “His energy, his length, his athleticism is big for us. Any time when he brings it like that, we’re a better team. Just encouraging him to be consistent every night and bring that same energy, because he’s huge for us.”
Minott said he appreciates the team’s trust in him, but he knows he could easily be sent back to the bench if he’s not performing to Mazzulla’s standard.
“Those guys want to be coached,” Mazzulla said of Queta and Minott, who are starting alongside championship mainstays Derrick White, Brown and Pritchard. “They want to be held accountable. They’ve done some really good things for us, and I think in order to get to a place that we know we can get to, we’ve just got to fight for execution all the time. So they understand that, they hold themselves to a high standard, and they did a great job of that, and we’ve just got to keep that up.”