Last season, the Boston Celtics turned the corner in December and put together an impressive run that ended in the NBA Finals. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get past the Golden State Warriorsto win their 18th title.
That’s why it was so shocking to see that the Celtics had suspended first-year coach Ime Udoka, as he had developed strong rapport with the team and led them to the ultimate stage for the first time in over a decade.
Udoka’s reportedly inapproapiateworkplace affairs led him to leave the team overnight. That didn’t sit well with the players. According to Jayson Tatum, Ime didn’t get the credit he deserved for the team’s success.
NBA News: Jayson Tatum Expresses Frustration Over Ime Udoka’s Controversy
(via The Athletic)
“Uh, it was confusing. Even to this day, there’s so much that — I guess for legal reasons — they can’t explain. So it’s like a vague situation, and there’s a lot of things they felt like they couldn’t say. So it kind of left a lot of us in the dark. You see things on the internet. You don’t know what is true, what’s not true, what to believe. It’s just an unfortunate situation.”
“Extremely frustrating, because you had this mindset of how we’re going to approach the season, how we’re gonna start, and then now we don’t have our head coach, somebody that I give a lot of credit to. He helped us get to that point, got us playing together, playing better.
“Ime deserves as much credit as anybody. Ime deserves a lot of credit for how he got us playing, and Joe has stepped up and found his own voice and obviously has got us rolling now. But I feel like Ime, especially last year, righted the ship to get us playing the right way.”
At the end of the day, it seems unlikely that Udoka will get another chance to coach in the NBA. But it’s not like we can make a true judgment until we don’t know all the facts, and chances are that will never happen, either.