The Celtics have officially announced in a press release (Twitter link) that they have suspended head coach Ime Udoka for the entirety of the 2022-23 NBA season, as had been expected. Ominously, the club also announced that the team would decide Udoka’s long-term fate with the franchise “at a later date.”
Udoka, who has a child with actress and longtime partner Nia Long, carried on a consensual affair with a female Celtics staffer, which has been determined to be a violation of Boston’s “organizational guidelines.”
Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN tweets that, as had been previously indicated, Boston will elevate assistant coach Joe Mazzulla to the role of interim head coach.
Mazzulla previously served as an assistant coach with the team’s NBAGL affiliate, then called the Maine Red Claws, during the 2016-17 season. He has been a Boston assistant since 2019, when the Celtics were still led on the sidelines by Stevens.
Whether or not Udoka actually returns to Boston following his suspension remains somewhat up in the air. A source informs Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated (via Twitter) that there is a chance Udoka will ultimately not be permitted to return to the team as coach. Udoka was known as one of the league’s top assistants over much of the last decade. He was hired for his first head coaching gig with the Celtics last summer. In what may have been his lone year with the club, Udoka led Boston to a 51-31 record and an NBA Finals berth.
Fielding much of the same roster, the team had gone just 36-36 in 2020-21, finishing with the No. 7 seed in the East, while being coached by current team president Brad Stevens. The Celtics would go on to lose 4-1 to the Nets in the first round of the 2021 playoffs. In 2022 under Udoka, Boston would avenge itself in the first round, sweeping Brooklyn.
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