Throughout the Celtics’ playoff run last spring, Phil Pressey would slip into Joe Mazzulla’s pregame news conferences, sit in the back of the room and listen to how Boston’s head coach answered questions from reporters.
At the time, it looked like curiosity. Turns out, it was job prep.
This offseason, the Celtics installed Pressey — a former Boston point guard who joined Mazzulla’s coaching staff in 2023 — as the new head coach of the franchise’s G League affiliate in Maine.
“Since I first retired when I was 30, 31, I made a commitment to focus on personal development,” Pressey, 34, said Friday in a video conference. “If you’re growing on the daily, whenever an opportunity happens, you’re going to be prepared. So any opportunity that I had to study Joe Mazzulla, study other coaches, take notes, practices, reflect on my playing career, the coaches that I’ve played for, what I learned from them, it just helped me be ready for the moment.”
Pressey first joined the Celtics as a 22-year-old undrafted rookie in 2013, arriving in Boston the same year as then-head coach and current president of basketball operations Brad Stevens. His NBA playing career was brief (125 games over two seasons with the Celtics, plus another 23 for the 76ers and Suns), but Stevens quickly realized the kid backing up Rajon Rondo, Avery Bradley and Marcus Smart had a future in coaching.
“I’ve thought Phil was ready for this from the first time I coached him when he was 21 years old and a rookie point guard for the Boston Celtics,” Stevens said in June. “He’s always really cared about the game. He cares about people. He’s got a great work ethic, and, yeah, he’s got a lot to learn. He’ll learn it on the fly. But how else would you better learn it than going and being thrown to the wolves and calling the shots? So it’s a great opportunity.”
This was always part of Pressey’s plan, too.
His father, Paul, made the same pivot in the early 1990s, moving into coaching after a decade-long career with the Bucks and Spurs. The elder Pressey spent 24 seasons as an NBA assistant — including two with Doc Rivers’ Celtics from 2004-06 — and another four at the college level before retiring in 2023.
“As a former point guard, I feel like I’ve always been a coach on the floor, an extension of the head coach,” Phil Pressey said. “For me growing up, my Plan A was to play in the NBA. My Plan B was to play in the NBA. And if I couldn’t get to the NBA, it was probably to be a coach. Having my father who kind of laid the foundation for me — he played, he got into coaching — I was doing the same thing. Being able to be a head coach now is something that I’ve always wanted to be able to do.”
Now that he has that title, Pressey is applying lessons learned from Stevens, Mazzulla and the other head coaches with whom he’s crossed paths as he leads Boston’s farm club.
“Playing for Brad Stevens my rookie year, he kind of laid the foundation for me as a coach,” Pressey said. “So now as I transition into a head coach, I’ve been able to work with Joe Mazzulla, learn his system, learn his philosophy, and then all the coaches I played for throughout my career, I’ve been able to implement their teachings into what I do on a daily. But going into these first three games and the beginning of my (head)-coaching career, it’s been a lot of fun.”
The idea to sit in on Mazzulla’s pressers, he said, was inspired by Dennis Gates, head coach at Missouri, where Pressey played and later worked as a graduate assistant.
“That’s something (Gates) did with Leonard Hamilton when he was at Florida State,” Pressey explained. “He would study his press conferences. He would practice these types of situations, because it matters. You (reporters) tell the story, so making sure I’m articulating my mindset, my vision, helps you tell the story better.”
( Boston, MA,12/12/14) Boston Celtics guard Phil Pressey (26) is pressured by New York Knicks guard Jose Calderon (3) as the Celtics take on the Knicks at the Garden. Friday, December 12, 2014. (Staff photo by Stuart Cahill)
Pressey hasn’t adopted Mazzulla’s more outlandish practice methods — no clips of wild animals spliced into his film sessions — but he has ventured outside of the basketball box to relate to his young players. After Maine lost its first three games to open the season, he quoted the movie “Kung Fu Panda” in a team meeting: “There’s no such thing as good or bad. There just is.”
Translation: You can’t erase a negative result. All you can do is learn from it and improve.
Pressey also can relate to the G League grind. He made 81 appearances in the league as a player, including one for Maine, before heading overseas to play for teams in Spain, Turkey and Germany.
Headlining his current Maine roster are the Celtics’ two 2025 second-round draft picks: point guard Max Shulga and center Amari Williams. Pressey said Shulga “has done a phenomenal job of running the show,” and he raved about Williams, calling him “a monster” and “a beast” with “high upside.”
Both are on two-way contracts that allow them to split time between the G League and NBA. So is wing Ron Harper Jr., who won a two-way spot in training camp and hit two 3-pointers in a garbage-time cameo with the big club on Wednesday.
As is the case in any minor league setting, Pressey’s top priority is player development, not wins and losses. That’s been a strength of the organization in recent years; the Celtics’ list of G League success stories includes Sam Hauser, Luke Kornet and Neemias Queta. And since most of Maine’s G League-only players have little chance of cracking Boston’s roster this season, having one poached by another NBA team is a victory in Pressey’s eyes.
The Maine C’s already have had one such departure, with Wendell Moore Jr. landing a two-way deal with Detroit this week. Pressey called that “the biggest pat on the back for our whole coaching staff.”
“You want to win as many games as you can,” he said, “but having guys get called up with two-ways, for me, is my primary objective. Making sure everybody on this staff — players and staff included — everybody moves up one level.”