Lots of Questions, Very Few Answers About Ime Udoka during Celtics Media Day

The players, like fans and the media, have learned very little from the Celtics about the specifics surrounding their head coach Ime Udoka being suspended all season.

For the Boston Celtics, their Media Day routine was filled with the usual questions surrounding the upcoming season and the health of key players.

But that's about the extent of normalcy, with most of the focus centered on the player's reaction to the yearlong suspension of head coach Ime Udoka.

The Celtics announced earlier this week that Udoka was suspended for the entire 2022-2023 season for multiple “policy violations.”

Udoka was reportedly involved in an inappropriate relationship with another Celtics female employee.

In a press conference earlier this week, Celtics co-owner Wyc Grousbeck said no one else involved in the incident has been disciplined.

Players, one after another, took the questions in stride, answering them as best they could, which wasn't very good in the grand scheme of things.

That’s because when they were told about the suspension, they weren’t given many details beyond that fact.

Which is why the players should be pissed right now, both at Udoka and the Celtics.

Udoka’s poor judgment may have cost this team a chance at winning an NBA title this year, a very real possibility considering they came within two games of winning one last season before losing in the NBA Finals to Golden State in six games.

Maddie Malhotra/Getty Images

And with him being suspended for the season, there’s no guarantee when his suspension is lifted that the Celtics will bring him back to be their head coach. Depending on how the facts of this case continue to trickle out, there’s also the possibility that this may spell the end of Udoka’s career as a coach.

As for the Celtics, it’s understandable why they have intentionally said very little to the players about the specifics behind Udoka’s suspension and the details they uncovered from the firm they hired this summer to start investigating the relationship between Udoka and the female Celtics employee.

But keeping the players in the dark exposes them to a season’s worth of questioning about Udoka who will be nowhere to be found to answer those questions.

Maddie Malhotra/Getty Images

At some point sooner rather than later, the questions about Udoka will die down for the players. But once the season starts, those questions will consistently pop up when they are on the road.

And once the postseason arrives, those questions will once again be asked over and over again.

It’ll become the worst version of Groundhog Day for the Celtics.

The players seem indifferent at this point in not having Udoka around, which may be the best way they know how to deal with their feelings on the matter.

“Nobody died, so I didn’t lose anything,” Smart told reporters on Monday. “I still love Ime as a person, as a coach. It’s just something unfortunate that has happened to him. It doesn’t take away from what he did as a coach. It doesn’t take away (from) how he turned this team around, how he led this team to our first Finals appearance in a long time. It’s just unfortunate this is where we’re at.

Smart added, “We still love him, but this is where we’re at.”

And that is a place where the optimism that all teams have this time of year, is not the strongest current flowing through the veins of this franchise.

On a team that answered so many of its critics a year ago and returns most of those players, there are questions, lots of questions, that are unanswered.

If only most of them had to do with basketball and the usual sense of normalcy the Celtics are used to.

Because Media Day was just a glimpse at the kind of season that awaits them, one that will be anything but business as usual.