More than three months after the news of the Ime Udoka scandal breaking and throwing a massive wrench into the plans of the Boston Celtics to get back to the 2023 NBA Finals, the Celtics seem to have landed on their feet and then some under interim head coach Joe Mazzulla.
But even with the team currently sitting on the best record in the league, the Udoka situation has lingered on in the background, quietly shouting into the void a series of unanswered questions that may never get their resolution outside of a court of law, an arbitration session — or, perhaps, anywhere.
In recent interviews with The Athletic’s Sam Amick and Jared Weiss, Boston’s two star wings Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown opened up on how that lingering unfinished business affected and continues to affect them and their teammates.
— Dr. Justin Quinn (@justinquinnn) December 13, 2022
When the scandal broke, as Tatum related, “it was confusing.”
The legal damper thrown across the organization ruffled many feathers as its fallout sparked unintended but serious consequences as it dragged in innocent people uninvolved in Udoka’s misconduct.
“Even to this day, there’s so much that — I guess for legal reasons — they can’t explain,” offered the St. Louis native. “So it’s like a vague situation, and there’s a lot of things they felt like they couldn’t say.”
For a team as storied as the Boston Celtics are, there are surprisingly fewer than you might think. https://t.co/2271p7FuZM
— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 14, 2022
Tatum shared that it “left a lot of us in the dark,” with players knowing little more than the media.
“You see things on the internet,” added the Duke alum, likely referring to the many salacious conspiracies hatched by internet sleuths responsible for dragging many Celtics employees unjustly.
“You don’t know what is true, what’s not true, what to believe. It’s just an unfortunate situation.”
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— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 14, 2022
The impact went beyond mere confusion for an organization with the loftiest of goals, too.
For Tatum, it was “extremely frustrating, because you had this mindset of how we’re going to approach the season, how we’re going to start, and then now we don’t have our head coach, somebody that I give a lot of credit to.”
Still, while, in Tatum’s view, “Ime deserves as much credit as anybody” for Boston’s current success, he also supports his current head coach, noting ” Joe has stepped up and found his own voice and obviously has got us rolling now.”
The Celtic champion alumnus gave his first-person account on a recent episode of the new Celtics podcast “View from the Rafters.” https://t.co/okL1EP7oo6
— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 13, 2022
For Brown, Udoka laid a foundation built on “our individual talent of what we did well and what (were) our superpowers, and “Joe’s done a good job of keeping that in place, where it’s like the system is built around what we do well, not that we are built into the system.”
“It’s not like one guy’s responsible for everything, but everybody’s contribution is what we’re being able to see now,” he explained, tracing a line directly from the Brad Stevens coaching era through Udoka to Mazzulla.
“Everybody, everything has been part of cultivating what we see now,” Brown emphasized, adding “hopefully, it’ll keep going so we can get over the hump.”
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— The Celtics Wire (@TheCelticsWire) December 13, 2022
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