Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla is best known for his fiery courtside passion and strategic brilliance, which helped lead the Celtics to an NBA championship. But behind the success, the 36-year-old coach says he’s been doing something far more important: wrestling with God.
In a recent interview on the Godsplaining podcast with Fr. Joseph-Anthony Kress, Mazzulla opened up about his Catholic faith, his desire to one day serve as a deacon, and the spiritual tug-of-war between ambition and gratitude that defines much of his life.
“I just became eligible to be a deacon, which I’ve always wanted to do,” Mazzulla shared. In the Catholic Church, a deacon is an ordained minister who can perform baptisms, lead prayers, witness marriages, and conduct funerals. Married men can serve as deacons beginning at age 35, but the role also carries deep spiritual responsibility—a commitment Mazzulla says he’s been prayerfully considering for years.
But even as he dreams of serving the Church, Mazzulla admitted that balancing faith and career can be a struggle. “Do I get greedy and want more?” he asked. “How do you find this space of wanting more yet being grateful for what God has given you?”
He confessed that his greatest fear is becoming like the “rich young ruler” from Scripture—someone who gains the world but loses his soul. “My biggest fear is 10 years from now, I wake up and I’m not willing to give up my treasures on this Earth because I’ve given everything I had to worldliness.”
Fr. Kress agreed that this is a real tension for people of faith living in high-performance environments. “We are free to enjoy good things,” he said, “but we must not be attached to them.” Mazzulla nodded in agreement: “That’s the space that I’m in spiritually. I think it’s a difficult space to be in.”
The Celtics coach also reflected on his early years and how easy it was to let basketball define him. “As a kid, it’s easier to believe your identity is in basketball than to believe someone died for you and gave up their life for you,” he said. When an injury forced him to miss a year of college basketball, Mazzulla said he realized how much of his spiritual void had been filled with the game.
“You don’t realize how much you’re filling your void, your spiritual void, with worldliness,” he explained. “You’re filling the relationship with Christ with relationships in the locker room, with success and failure.”
Through that painful season, Mazzulla says he learned to find his worth not in wins, but in God’s love. His message to young athletes now is simple: “Trust and believe that what God says about you is true, and that your value and your gifts go beyond the temporary ability to perform at a high level. It’s not eternal, and it doesn’t last.”
Faith has long been central to Mazzulla’s public life. After winning the NBA Finals, he famously wore a shirt that read, “But first… let me thank God.” When asked about representation in coaching, Mazzulla turned the focus toward faith rather than race: “I wonder how many of those have been Christian coaches,” he said.
For Mazzulla, success on the court is fleeting—but faith, he says, is forever.