I’m not used to people like Ime Udoka.
I’m a member of the media. When we ask questions, we expect all of our interviewees to turn into Barry Sanders as they juke and dodge their way through canned answers.
Udoka is more like Walter Payton.
“Pretty blunt and straight to the point,” Udoka admits. “That's just me.”
It’s not that he lacks tact. It’s that he believes in accountability. If that means answering a question honestly about a player not performing up to his capabilities, so be it. After Boston’s crushing loss in New York on an RJ Barrett buzzer beater two months ago, Udoka said “we need some leadership. Somebody that can calm us down and not get rattled when everything starts to go a little south. I think it snowballs between our guys. So, step up and, or (I’m) going to have to stop all our momentum and pace and call a play.”
Ouch.
Since then, though, Boston is 22-5. It was a loss, and a message from the coach, that seems to be a clear turning point of this season.
“I challenged their mental toughness. Some people liked it, some people didn’t,” Udoka said. “I got tired of it, the team got tired of it, we responded well.”
The ‘some people,’ it turns out, were the people on the outside who wondered out loud if Udoka’s blunt style was appropriate.
“It was pointed out to me that challenging the players publicly wasn’t welcomed by everyone,” Udoka said. “Like I care. The guys love it.”
Those last seven words sum up everything important to Udoka. He’s going to be true to two entities: himself, and his players.
“He's just been very vocal, very direct, he's been a coach that holds everyone to a higher standard no matter what,” Grant Williams said. “He's not just challenging us but the group as a whole to be better. He challenges us to hold each other accountable as well. As much as he gets on you, 'What did I do this time?' You will be able to talk to him still and he won't hold anything against you and that's something a great head coach does.’"
There is no time between the line for pleases and thank yous, but there is also no time for being stubborn. This is the NBA, with teams full of grown men making ungodly sums of money. The coach has a role, and Udoka’s role is to be tough with the team, but that's not his only job.
“He does a great job of staying with us,” Marcus Smart said. “It would be easy for him to kind of go and be like “what the hell is going on with this group?' But he continued to stay positive for us, encourage us, stay on top of us, hold us accountable, and it’s starting to show … we want to continue to go out there and play the way that he wants us to for him.”
Playing the way Udoka wants has been a bit of a process. There were the injuries and the COVID outbreak that delayed everything, but to the team’s credit, nothing got derailed. Udoka’s hard coaching came from a belief that more was possible with this team, and that how things had always been done wasn’t going to be how things would be done from now on.
“It’s one of those processes that – it is challenging,” Al Horford said. “It is challenging because it’s almost breaking some ways that we used to play before – things that we did before – and try to buy into the way that he wants us to play. Getting out of our comfort zones, we’re being put in different positions, we’re asked to do different things, and that takes time.”
Time.
It’s the most valuable thing we have, yet we never really seem to truly value it how we should. We don’t seem to understand the power of it. Udoka has a better grasp on it than most, and that comes from his coaching mentor, Gregg Popovich.
Popovich has a framed Jacob Riis quote on his wall that reads "When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it -- but all that had gone before."
Udoka, a graduate of Pounding The Rock University in San Antonio, never lost faith.
“I was always optimistic,” he told BostonSportsJournal.com. “We have a younger staff and It felt like, at times, they were kind of like, ‘okay’, ‘you know,’ and I was like, ‘stay the course.’
Staying the course is what got Udoka to Boston. Someone like Jayson Tatum has just three stops leading up to, and through, his professional career: Chaminade College Preparatory School, Duke University, and the Boston Celtics. Udoka is up to about two dozen when you factor in the coaching stops. He could have stopped hammering a long time ago. He wasn’t going to let a couple of bad months get in his way.
“I've seen what works and doesn't, you know, the goods and bad's of different organizations,” Udoka said. “I always take took notes as far as that.”
Those notes are now being applied not only to his team, but to his stars. The Celtics turnaround is not just a function of the team growing as a group, but as Tatum and Jaylen Brown growing as players.
Tatum’s turnaround from the beginning of the season has been especially remarkable. It’s a process that began with Team USA, where Udoka was an assistant and Popovich was a head coach. Popovich famously challenged Tatum to become a better defender and the Celtics star took it to heart. Udoka followed a similar road map to getting Tatum to expand his offensive game.
“It's just being direct and blunt and pointing out certain things that you see immediately,” Udoka told BSJ. “You have to be careful how you word it. We're not trying to change you. What you've done has obviously got you all league honors and All-Star and a max contract and all that. And you have to understand that part of it. Guys are playing for certain things. But how can we take the next step and your growth is a big part of it.”
Tatum accepted the challenge from day one without any pushback. For all the talk about Udoka’s personality traits that have challenged players, NBA players have to be willing to accept that.
“They don't like to hear change a lot,” Udoka said. “But you do have to improve and grow and learn. …I would say the relationship we have and the character that he has allows me to do that. And so you've seen the growth and the best part is seeing them seeing the results. That stuff's all starting to come to fruition.”
The character of the team, especially its star players, allows Udoka to be who he is. Hard coaching was a buzz-phrase coming into the season, and both Tatum and Brown vouched for Udoka’s hiring knowing that would be how things went. Udoka has taken advantage of that by putting even more on the shoulders of his young leaders.
“Whether it's Jaylen or Jayson, they've all been great in (film) sessions,” Udoka said. “They ask for more, want to be coached harder. And I think a lot of times when the other guys see you coaching the two guys the hardest, pointing them out -- if I have an equal clip of Marcus and Jayson or Jaylen, I'm putting Jayson and Jaylen in it because they have the responsibility to do more. So continue to point out to those guys, but nothing I'm saying in the group setting, I'm not saying these guys individually.”
Connecting to his players was a promise Udoka made from the beginning. Getting them to grow into this team, and into more dynamic individuals, starts from them trusting the coaches. Players need to know the coaches want what’s best for them; the need to believe that everything being said and done in practices and film sessions is for the betterment of the players and the team.
So when Udoka was assembling his staff, he opted to go with a familiar group of guys he trusts. He did not, as some rookie head coaches do, include a former head coach in the mix.
“The focus for me was more so relationship building with our guys more so than X's and O's or a guy that's been there and done that,” Udoka told BSJ. “I've been around 10 years and played my whole life and live basketball. So there's not a lot that I don't know, as far as that other than being in that seat.
“I honestly talked to Brad (Stevens) and he said something that stood out to me where he had an ex-head coach in his first few years. And that can stunt your growth a little bit. … And so to me, that allows you to grow and try things. And a lot of times older coaches are stuck in their ways. And you want to have a new young approach. And I think that was more beneficial to me.”
Udoka, in a sense, has been running a basketball marathon his whole life, so he is not going to let someone else carry him across the finish line. The notes he’s taken along the way are being applied, people he trusts are helping him do it, and players he’s developed relationships with are making it happen on the floor.
“If it was anything else we were talking about, I wouldn't be as confident in what I'm saying. It's a full time thing for me,” Udoka said. “I would never be on my way or the highway type guy because every meeting I want debate, discussion and argument within the staff, and we kind of all come together with different ideas. So it's not as much my way or the highway, it's just, we're confident in what we do. And I don't think I need an ex-head coach to validate some of the things we're talking about or doing or figuring out.”
That it’s only taken half a season to figure out is, in a lot of ways, a bit surprising when you think about it. That these guys have so quickly evolved to get away from habits they’ve had their whole lives is, in the big picture, an accomplishment in itself.
It’s manifesting itself on the floor in winning streaks, awards, and heightened expectations for a team that was written off a couple of months ago. We look at this team and think they’ve gone a long way, but Ime Udoka is just getting started.
“You have to be patient. That's the main thing. You have to understand the habits that I'm talking about don't come overnight,” Udoka said. “I've said it from day one, not to talk bad about other organizations, but I was a finalist in Indiana and all these other places and if you would have told me to wait a year or two for this, it would have been no brainer. Everything works the way it should and we got a high level group. I can't complain at all and expectations are a good thing for me.”
