Rockets coach Ime Udoka’s hilarious response to Luka Doncic trash talk

On Sunday afternoon, head coach Ime Udoka and the Houston Rockets saw their team’s faint playoff hopes come to an end with an overtime road loss to the Dallas Mavericks despite leading pretty much throughout the entirety of the game, including holding a 15-point advantage at the end of the first quarter. The Mavericks got the game into overtime courtesy of a buzzer beater in regulation from Dante Exum, who has seen a career resurgence during his time in Dallas, and ultimately, Udoka’s squad will now be officially be watching the big dance from home despite a recent 11-game winning streak that shocked pundits and fans around the league.

During the final moments of overtime, Luka Doncic hit a shot that essentially put the game away for the Mavericks and appeared to say something in Udoka’s direction as he headed back down to the other end of the court.

After the game, Udoka was asked about that incident and had a hilariously blunt response.

“I don’t understand Slovenian so I don’t know,” said Udoka, per Jackson Gatlin of Locked on Rockets on X, the social media platform formerly referred to as Twitter.

For his part, Doncic indicated that the verbal sparring stemmed from a previous encounter between himself and Udoka earlier in the season from which there was evidently still some animosity.

“He was talking to me in the first game there, so you know I’m going to go back,” said Doncic, per Noah Weber of The Smoking Cuban on X.

A disappointing finish for the Rockets

As previously mentioned, coach Udoka and the Rockets recently raised eyebrows around the league with a shocking 11-game winning streak that saw them catapult from a surefire lottery team to having a legitimate chance to knock off the Golden State Warriors and secure the number ten seed in the vaunted Western Conference playoff picture, thereby earning themselves a spot in the Play-In round, which would have given them a chance to compete for a spot in the NBA playoffs.

Instead, the Rockets have now lost several games in a row while the Warriors have found a bit more consistency, and Golden State effectively ended any realistic chance that Houston had at that prized number ten slot with a recent win in the Rockets’ home arena, which saw Klay Thompson have one of his best games of the year.

Still, Ime Udoka’s first year at the helm in Houston following his stint leading the Boston Celtics to the 2022 NBA Finals was a relative success, as the team’s free agent signings of Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks paid dividends and the team also saw the emergence of Alperen Sengun (who ironically missed the entirety of the winning streak due to injury, as well as the rest of the season) as a player with legitimate star potential.

Next year, the expectation will likely be that the Rockets at least make the Play-In round with another year of experience, and motivation from this year’s disappointing finish, under their belt.