Could a rough start to the 2022-23 NBA season put Boston Celtics interim head coach Joe Mazzulla on the hotseat?

Could the Boston Celtics find themselves with a new head coach by midseason if things go poorly at the start of the 2022-23 NBA season?

While it seems a bit much given largely positive results from interim head coach Joe Mazzulla’s brief tenure in that role coming out of the Celtics’ training camp and preseason, the stakes are almost as high as they could be for Boston to make a serious run at the finals again.

If Mazzulla is not up to snuff, The Ringer’s Chris Ryan wonders if a former Utah Jazz head coach might be at Boston’s helm (or perhaps another club’s with similarly ill fortune) by spring.

“I wouldn’t say Joe Mazzulla, Doc Rivers, Steve Nash or Nate McMillan have hot seats, per se,” said Ryan in a recent Ringer article. “But I’m also not saying that their seats couldn’t be occupied by Quin Snyder by the spring.”

The Celtics’ season would have to go pretty poorly for Mazzulla to be at risk of losing his gig. He is one of the few tethers between last season’s success and the present — particularly after the Ime Udoka scandal and the loss of lead assistant Will Hardy (to of all places, Utah) decimated Boston’s bench.

But Mazzulla has a fairly narrow runway and not a lot of experience piloting the airplane that is this Celtics roster. While we have strong doubts it’ll come to that, we can understand why the interim coach would be in the company the Ringer analyst places him.

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Story originally appeared on Celtics Wire