​Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla believes there are correlations between mixed martial arts and basketball.Mazzulla, who’s attended several Ultimate Fighting Championship events, was recently seen training MMA with esteemed coach Eric Nicksick at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas. He has revealed that he looks up MMA gyms to train at while traveling through different cities during the NBA season.Mazzulla believes MMA helps him build a fighter mentality, which is required while taking on rival NBA teams in enemy territories.“I think it just keeps you fresh, mentally and physically, so that when I’m helping the team, I have a little bit of that fighter mentality,” Mazzulla told Ariel Helwani. “It just helps grow a little bit of an edge, and every little bit helps.”Mazzulla is also taking specific inputs from Nicksick about communicating with athletes. He believes there are similarities between MMA and basketball in terms of coaches communicating with the players and is learning Nicksick’s techniques of in-game communication amidst all the chaos.“The thing that’s interesting in the in-fight communication,” Mazzulla added. “I think communication can be distracting. I ask Eric a lot about what his communication is during the round… There’s a timeout component in communication, but also in-game communication… I think one of the hardest things in coaching is to relay, in a simple way, what you see to the players so that they can see it simply and execute. I think Eric does a great job of that.”