ORLANDO — The latest “Only Joe Mazzulla” story came courtesy of Celtics guard Derrick White.
On this week’s episode of his “White Noise” podcast, White shared an anecdote about Mazzulla playing machine gun noises over the Auerbach Center speakers at the start of one Celtics practice.
“It was me and Payton (Pritchard),” White recalled. “We’re going, and Joe is like, ‘Play the music!’ And the next thing you know, it’s just machine guns going off. I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ The entire time we did this drill, the machine guns were going off, and that’s how we started practice. Zig-zags, defense, picking up full(-court) and stuff like that. … Next thing you know, you’re in a war zone, for real. It was unbelievable.”
Joe Mazzulla played MACHINE GUN sounds at practice 🤣
“He’s like ‘Play the music!’ and next thing you know you’re in a war zone” 💀 pic.twitter.com/TGp3w3TQ1D
— White Noise Podcast w/Derrick White (@whitenoisepod_) November 6, 2025
Asked Friday morning about his reaction to the unexpected sounds of gunfire, White said it “definitely caught (him) by surprise.” But as someone who’s played under Mazzulla for the last four-plus seasons, he’s accustomed to the head coach’s often eccentric motivational methods, which have ranged from Spikeball tournaments in practice to watching videos of killer whales.
“I mean, especially to start to practice like that, you know what kind of practice it’s going to be,” White said at Boston’s team hotel ahead of Friday night’s road matchup with the Magic. “It just kind of changes your mindset right there. But I think I know him pretty well now, so it kind of all just blends together. He kind of gets you going in different ways, and you kind of have to try to figure out where his point is going half the time. But that’s the fun part.”
This particular Mazzulla moment occurred last month, near the end of Boston’s preseason, according to third-year wing Jordan Walsh. He said he wasn’t surprised to hear the machine guns because “war zone” has been one of the team’s mantras.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds like Joe,’” Walsh said. “… I laughed. I thought it was hilarious. But it was funny because we’ve been preaching ‘war zone’ for so long, and everybody knows Joe likes to fight and all this dangerous stuff. So it was cool to have that. It brought more energy to the practice.”
Through sound effects and his own hands-on coaching, Mazzulla has implored the Celtics, who lost a large portion of their championship-winning rotation this summer, to play with more intensity this season, especially on the defensive end.
“We’d be picking up full-court for 10 minutes straight,” Walsh said, “and (he’s) just right next to you in a defensive stance yelling at you.”
The new approach has yielded mixed results thus far — Boston entered Friday with a 4-5 record — but it has helped the Celtics be more disruptive defensively. Their opponents are turning the ball over at the third-highest rate in the NBA, trailing only Portland and Cleveland.
Last season’s Celtics forced the fourth-fewest turnovers and ranked 24th in opponent turnover rate, preferring to defend conservatively and limit free-throw attempts.
“I think it just comes with the aggression that we’re playing with,” Walsh said. “I feel like since we’re making people speed up, we’re picking up full-court, making people go faster. We’re in deeper shifts, so people have to make decisions later than they usually would. I think that’s what’s causing it, but it is something that we wanted to preach because we felt like we didn’t turn people over enough last year. And so one of the things that we talked about going into the season was we want to make people turn it over and want to be able to play faster.”