This is a great time to be part of the Portland, Oregon basketball scene.
When Will Hardy left the Celtics, the jokes about Portland native Ime Udoka reaching back into his hometown to add to his staff wrote themselves. He already had four on his staff, and unsurprisingly, he made Mike Moser the fifth this week. Moser went to high school in Portland and was on the Oregon Women’s basketball staff.
Hiring Portlanders might be the only predictable thing about Udoka after one year at the helm. We probably have a grasp on some of the basics, like his emphasis on defense and how he’ll light his team up during a timeout after some particularly tepid play, but the rest is still a mystery.
It’s hard to connect the dots on a person when all we really have is one dot.
Udoka’s first season was a pretty wild one. It began with some fans begging for him to be fired and ended with Boston two wins from a championship.
He was like a pilot pulling his plane out of a stall and nosedive about 500 feet from the ground. He pushed every single button he could to get this thing to work, and when it finally did, it took off like a rocket. But just because that's how he piloted the team in his first season, it doesn’t mean that's how it will be going forward.
Unlike this summer, Udoka took over a team in 2021 with a bit of an uncertain future. The team was very much in an evaluation mode, and a lot of decisions about who the team would proceed had to be made. The team wasn’t built to make a deep run, but Udoka was able to coax a winner out of this roster by (a) finding a way to get everyone to buy into what he was selling, (b) getting Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown to expand their games, and most importantly (c) riding his stars and playing them a ton of minutes.
It obviously worked, and if the team had just been a bit more poised and able to finish off the Milwaukee Bucks and Miami Heat in fewer than seven games, maybe he’d have a ring to show for it.
But that what-if is also at the heart of the question about Udoka’s coaching style moving forward.
The Celtics’ situation is much different coming into this season. We know what this team is capable of doing, and with the new additions of Malcolm Brogdon and Danilo Gallinari, along with the internal growth of the returning Celtics, this is a team that can win it all next season.
However, the path to a championship will already require Udoka to do some things a little differently. Managing minutes because of the short turnaround will become a higher priority, and with a deeper bench, doing so will be a bit easier.
How much Udoka chooses to limit his heavy-minute players early on will be our first tip into how differently he’ll coach this upcoming season. The deeper bench affords Udoka the opportunity to lean on his second unit without risking losses quite as much. Extra minutes for Brogdon and Gallo will mean fewer for guys like Tatum, Brown, and Al Horford.
Another reason why Udoka leaned so heavily on his main guys early last season was to get them all acclimated to his defensive plan. It’s safe to say that the added versatility in Brogdon will keep the Celtics switching scheme pretty much intact. Whereas last season they had to hammer the switching home throughout the preseason and early regular season, this year brings a bit more familiarity.
With that in mind, Boston can start adding some new wrinkles, maybe mixing in a little zone defense to throw out there when Gallinari is on the floor. Knowing his team can switch, Udoka can spend some time mixing in some curveballs or perfecting his drop coverages. The institutional knowledge could be a foundation on which Udoka builds a more complex defense.
It also works on the other side of the floor. Much of last season was spent trying to turn Tatum and Brown into distributors, but they will now come into this season with a full year of that mentality under their belts. They know what’s expected of them when they're attacking, so now it can become more second nature. This could allow them to advance to another stage of working off one another off the ball. With the added weapons of Brogdon and Gallinari, there will be more space for them to work off the ball and incorporate different actions where they capitalize on confusing the defense.
Also, knowing his team has an ability to ramp up and switch gears will give Udoka a little more leeway to expand his lineups in the early going. There's nothing wrong with going 10 or even 11 deep in November and then slowly building guys up to their playoff workload.
A year in Udoka’s system has given everyone a firm grasp on what Udoka is looking for on both ends. There will always be some level of perfecting those things, but the comfort level with them allows for Udoka to expand his coaching repertoire. Of course, he also might just stick to what worked. They did get to the Finals, after all.
There's always room to improve and grow. Udoka is probably not one to rest on laurels, so he’s going to find a way to push his team. It will be interesting to see how much of what he did last season was out of necessity and how much will carry over with a team mostly running it back but adding some key new pieces.
We might think we know who Udoka is as a coach, but one year running the team really gives us no frame of reference. That is going to take time to figure out, but a second dot will at least give us a line that goes in a certain direction.
