Brad Stevens has spent the last few years in a quiet but unmistakable pivot from coach to architect. On Tuesday afternoon, that pivot was officially recognised when the Boston Celtics' president of basketball operations was named the NBA's Executive of the Year for the 2025-26 season, his second time winning the award.
The news landed hours before the Celtics tipped off Game 5 against the Philadelphia 76ers, and Joe Mazzulla, who once worked under Stevens as an assistant coach, was asked what his former boss brings to the building.
"I think not just him but the front office in general," Mazzulla said. "The front office, the scouting department, analytics department. There's a lot of moving parts that go into signing a guy, drafting a guy, bringing a guy in. A very diligent process. A lot of communication, but a lot of trust that goes into that. I think there's a lot of alignment into how we want to play basketball. So with that allow people to kind of do their jobs, and those guys are really good at what they do."
The roster Stevens has assembled around Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown has bent without breaking for two straight seasons. He converted draft capital and salary flexibility into Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis in 2023, navigated the second apron with surgical precision, and continued to slot rotation pieces around the core with minimum-deal hits and trade-deadline tweaks. Whatever the formula is, Mazzulla is confident in how the partnership works because he has lived inside it.
"I think communication and how we see the game," Mazzulla said when asked how his coaching years under Stevens shaped the relationship now. "We're in meetings every day talking to each other, whether it was an argument, whether it was something we agreed on, conversation going back and forth talking different things. Just being around each other every day, having to communicate, having to get through wins, losses, playoff series, you just develop an understanding of each other, a level of communication and alignment. And then you just pull from each other's experiences, because we had been there together."
The Executive of the Year award is voted on by the league's general managers and front-office executives. For Stevens, the timing made it bittersweet — he picked up the trophy on the same day his team blew a 13-point second-half lead at home and lost Game 5 to Philadelphia, dropping the Celtics into a 3-2 hole heading back to the City of Brotherly Love. Asked how he and his staff approach a closeout-game environment, Mazzulla pointed back to one of his favourite themes.
"Same thing we talked about throughout the series, just not having an expectation of how the game is supposed to go," he said. "Just sticking to the details and the execution and playing with a level of effort. Effort's important, and then whatever the game needs, we have to be able to do that. So nothing different. Just a higher level of intensity, effort and execution."
Stevens did not address the media himself before tip, but the larger point of his award is that the work has been compounding for years. The Celtics' core has been together long enough that they understand each other in their sleep. The supporting cast has been replenished without losing the team's identity. And the head coach who plays in the same building, day after day, with the executive who hired him and once mentored him, says that is the part that makes it run.
"You're going to get the best version of each team," Mazzulla said of the closeout series ahead. "So we have to be prepared to be able to handle that."
