Houston Rockets Hire Ime Udoka As Head Coach Despite Past

After leading the Boston Celtics to the NBA Finals in 2022, the franchise suspended and later fired head coach Ime Udoka after details about workplace misconduct, including abusive behavior toward at least one subordinate female employee and his engagement in an inappropriate relationship with her, came to light in September. Though the Brooklyn Nets passed on hiring the outcast in November, due to “the outcry after word of their plan became known to people outside and inside the organization,” as The Athletic reported in November, yesterday the Houston Rockets gave Udoka a stamp of approval and named him the team’s new head coach.

“The hiring is a coup for Rockets general manager Rafael Stone, who helped sell Udoka on the franchise’s young talent, salary cap space and chance at winning the draft lottery and selecting generational talent Victor Wembanyama,” wrote ESPN. “Udoka’s ability to galvanize a locker room and command respect were an immense part of his appeal to the Rockets and the marketplace.”

The Rockets reportedly investigated Udoka’s behavior while on staff in Boston with assistance from the NBA, the Celtics and other parties, said ESPN. For reasons that remain unclear at this time, Houston emerged comfortable enough with the findings to move forward with the hiring — a winning moment for those who champion second chances, but a maneuver that can also be viewed as a step backward in the cultural struggle toward enhanced civil rights and workplace equity for women.

The NBA Just Fined the Mavericks $750K. Was That Enough?

It’s one of the largest fines in league history

“An independent law firm probe into Udoka found that he used crude language in his dialogue with a female subordinate before the start of an improper workplace relationship with her, an element that significantly factored into the severity of Udoka’s initial suspension,” ESPN wrote this morning. In September, the Celtics majority owner, Wyc Grousbeck, said the initial suspension of the coach was a matter of “conscience,” and shortly thereafter former NBA player Matt Barnes, who’d initially defended Udoka, changed his stance after learning more details about the situation. “He’ll be lucky if he coaches in the NBA again,” said Barnes. “To be honest with you, it’s pretty heavy, man. It’s just some stuff you can’t do.”

Aside from the obvious fact that targeting a subordinate with distasteful language is, to put it mildly, unprofessional, engaging in a relationship with one is particularly reprehensible. The power dynamics at play call into question whether or not the relationship is completely consensual. What makes the Udoka case even more troubling is that the office affair took place while he was in a long-term romantic partnership with actor Nia Long, the mother of their son who was 11 years old when news of the scandal broke. The pair split over Udoka’s infidelity, with Long describing the ordeal as “devastating.”

But taking a team that on paper seemed slightly undermanned in the Eastern Conference going into the playoffs last year all the way to the NBA Finals, where they put up a good fight against an opponent with a robust championship pedigree, apparently counts for a lot in the league. The Houston hiring of Udoka, who is of Nigerian descent, places a Black man in a top leadership role, which is a positive considering that the NBA continues to struggle in the area of representation among its management ranks.

However, the league’s rosters have been dominated by people of color for decades — individuals who’ve accrued the type of experience that Udoka had as a player that could also qualify them for an NBA head coach position. So it remains troubling that even the most encouraging aspect of this story is something that could have been addressed with the ascension of any number of other men of color without the baggage of Udoka. The circumstances in which someone deserves a chance at redemption or not remains impossible to define with total certainty, as the Nets found out when considering Udoka. We’ll see how he conducts himself in Houston.