STILL CHIPPING AWAY AT DOUBT
Just as he did with the Spurs, Ime Udoka is wildly exceeding expectations in Boston
SAN ANTONIO — The first question was about credibility. How could anyone expect Ime Udoka to walk into that locker room and command any?
If Udoka didn't look out of place at first, his résumé sure did. Among the city names on his list of qualifications were Fargo, Glens Falls, North Charleston and Las Palmas. Those stops weren't likely to impress many NBA players, let alone the future Hall of Famers who'd just swept their way to the league championship.
As the Spurs looked to defend their title in 2007, they saw enough potential in the dogged journeyman to award him the first multiyear contract of his career. But they weren't sure they needed him, and to start training camp their head coach predicted there wouldn't be much playing time for Udoka.
“Unless,” Gregg Popovich said, “he beats somebody out.”
It wouldn't be the last time Udoka had to prove he deserved an opportunity, or the last time he showed a knack for making skepticism disappear. Fifteen years after he won over Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, he did the same with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, and the latter feat might be more impressive.
Duncan and Ginobili, after all, had shown they could win with just about anybody. Before they flipped a switch this spring, many wondered if anybody could make the TatumBrown tandem work.
In this, his first season as an NBA head coach, Udoka unlocked something in one of the league's most talented yet most perplexing teams, and his success with the Celtics might be because like with the Spurs, he never saw any reason to doubt himself.
In 2007, he was coming off a solid year with the Trail Blazers, but the Spurs were his 13th professional basketball team in eight years. With a two-year contract in hand, he scouted just “almost every neighborhood in San Antonio” and purchased his first house.
What gave him reason to believe he could stick around?
“I'm a thinking player,” Udoka told the Express-News then, “so I think I can pick up their system.”
He picked it up so well, in fact, that he not only replaced Bruce Bowen as the Spurs' defensive stopper during parts of three seasons as a player, he also replaced Mike Budenholzer as Popovich's most trusted assistant. Saturday, Udoka and Budenholzer were on opposite benches for the Celtics' 103-101 loss to the Bucks in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
That Udoka was coaching on the first weekend of May, projecting his usual calm, might have come as a shock a few months ago. There was a time early this season when it looked like Udoka might not make it past the All-Star break, as a Celtics team that had been frustrated by recent playoff failures showed signs of imploding for good.
During Boston's home opener last October, the Celtics were booed off the floor at halftime and lost by 32 points. On Jan.
28 they were in danger of missing the playoffs with a 25-25 record, and some called for drastic measures. Wasn't it finally time for general manager Brad Stevens to make a big move? Or for Udoka to try something new?
Nobody would have blamed Udoka if he did. But that's not what he'd learned during nine years — six as an assistant — with Popovich.
“A lot of coaches at times try to show how smart they are and overcoach,” Udoka told Marc Spears of And scape. “Not doing that is a big one with (Popovich).”
So Udoka stuck with his plan, and eventually his Celtics caught on. They won 26 of their last 32 games to finish the regular season, and after they swept Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the Nets out of the first round, Tatum had one thing to say about Udoka.
“I'm glad that we got him,” Tatum said.
It had been a long time coming. In the context of the playoff spotlight, Udoka still seems like a newcomer, but it's not as though Stevens just stumbled upon him by happenstance when he hired him to take over as Boston's head coach. Udoka long had been committed to the trajectory that would lead him there.
Three years ago, when he left the Spurs' bench for a gig as an assistant at Philadelphia, he did so because Popovich adivised him it would better set him up for a head coaching job. A decade ago, Udoka could have kept plugging away as a player but instead took Popovich up on his offer to hang up his sneakers and become an assistant.
And 15 years ago, when he was earning respect as Duncan's teammate? Few knew it at the time, but Udoka was coaching then, too. According to a new feature in Tte New York Times, Udoka spent his summers from 2006 to 2009 leading an AAU team he founded in Portland, doing everything from organizing practices to doing the laundry.
“This guy is in the NBA,” former AAU player Garrett Jackson told the Times, “and he's washing our clothes at the hotel.”
He's not washing clothes anymore. After Saturday, his more pressing concern is coming up with a solution for Giannis Antetokounmpo. But when he walks into the locker room to present the plan for Game 4?
The question won't be about credibility.