Former Nigeria national basketball team star, Ime Udoka is not a happy man at the moment, having seen his team bottle up their chance for glory in the NBA Finals.
Golden Warriors, late Thursday night, conquered Boston Celtics to emerge NBA champions again with a 103-90 victory in Game 6.
This is Golden State Warriors’ fourth championship in the last eight seasons.
Though Udoka is proud of coming this far in his first season as Celtics’ Head Coach, he remains pained in the manner of the loss as his team came quite close, yet so far.
In his postgame interview with NBC Sports, Udoka said that after getting this far, to within two wins of a championship, suffering a season-ending loss like the 103-90 decision at TD Garden is going to sting.
“I’m proud of the overall year,” Udoka said he told the team. “We went through a lot. The foundation has been set.”
Truly, Udoka’s reign at Celtics has come with a huge leap.
As recently as Januart 6, the Celtics were 18-21, in 11th place in the Eastern Conference.
“We’ll try to paint a broad look at the big picture of the things we did well this year and what we can build on,” Udoka said.
Interestingly, Udoka isn’t new to losing in the NBA Finals in his first year in a role.
Almost a decade ago as a first-year assistant coach under Gregg Popovich in San Antonio, the Spurs were 5 seconds away from finishing off LeBron James and the Heat in Game 6 when former Celtics guard Ray Allen drilled a corner 3 to help force overtime, a game Miami would go on to win before capturing Game 7 and the series.
“It’s always going to sit with you,” Udoka said. “The way I lost it, you always remember that. You have to use it as fuel and motivation and experience to propel you forward…We’ll learn from this as a staff and that’s what I said with the guys, no one can come back the same.”
That star-studded Spurs team that had the likes of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard, would return to the Finals the very next year and beat the Heat with Udoka still on staff.
Many are keen to see Celtics pull up the same stuff for Udoka in his second year and the Nigerian-American believes it is possible
Udoka believes with the draft, free agency and summer league coming in the weeks ahead, his team can be properly bolstered to face the task in the coming seasons.
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