Joe Mazzulla explains his fascination with ‘The Town’

“As an assistant, I watched him two to three times a week, it’s easy,” Mazzulla said. “We do most of our work after the games, so you have to stay up late at night. I never liked waking up with yesterday’s work to do. When I was an assistant and had to turn in my post-game changes, I would go home and work from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. I needed something to keep me awake or keep me going.

“There was a mix of three movies (the other two were “Whiplash” and “The Dark Knight”) that I would turn on to get me ahead in the game so I could go to bed. The City ended up being part of it. It’s not something that I’m obsessed with to the point where I still watch it. This is part of my post-match process that has helped me.

Although it appears Mazzulla has since cut back on his weekly viewing sessions, the coach certainly hasn’t hidden his obsession during his first year as the team’s head coach in 2023.

The first time he talked about “The Town” was when he told NBC Sports Boston’s Brian Scalabrine in January of last year that he would watch the movie four times a week. Mazzulla told Scalabrine that as head coach of the Celtics, the film is “a Boston mindset.”

Then, after the Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals in May, Mazzulla wore a sweatshirt that said, “Whose car are we going to take?”

The quote comes from Jem Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) responding to Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) by saying that both are going to commit an unspecified criminal act.

Mazzulla then spoke to the “Pardon My Take” hosts about the impact of “The Town” on his daily life in the city of Boston.

“Randomly, throughout the day, the assistants are just throwing out lines from the movie,” he said. “Every time I walk through the North End, I say to myself, ‘Say your prayers.’ »

The sophomore Celtics head coach also spoke about the impact the Fenway Park robbery scene in the film had on him, explaining that he couldn’t attend a Red Sox game without thinking about it.

“I went to Fenway the other day and I was literally looking for exit strategies to steal Fenway,” Mazzulla said. “If we ever decided to steal from Fenway, I was like, ‘We could probably really get away with that.’ How could you not go to Fenway thinking you couldn’t steal it?