The Boston Celtics are set to hire Brooklyn Nets assistant Ime Udoka as head coach, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski on Wednesday. Udoka, 43, will replace Brad Stevens as the Celtics’ new head coach (Stevens is now Boston’s president of basketball operations).
And ESPN basketball analyst Jay Williams reacted to the news with the following tweet, celebrating the Celtics the first coach of color in the organization’s history.
That would indeed be a fact very much worth celebrating if it were actually true. But it’s quite, quite wrong. Udoka would actually make for the Celtics’ sixth head coach of color.
In 1966, Bill Russell became the first Black head coach in North American pro sports history when he was a player-coach for the Celtics, and he won two championships as the head coach. K.C. Jones also won two championships as Boston head coach in the ’80s. Tom Sanders was head coach for the Celtics in 1978. M.L. Carr was the Celtics’ head coach from 1995-97.
And the most recent example, who’s still very much an active head coach in the NBA for the Philadelphia 76ers: Doc Rivers won an NBA title as the Celtics’ head coach in 2008 and was head coach in Boston for nine seasons.
After many people pointed out how incorrect the tweet was, it was deleted from Williams’ account. LeBron James even tweeted about it.
https://twitter.com/KingJames/status/1407825518758531074?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1407825518758531074%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsports.yahoo.com%2Fespn-jay-williams-hacker-twitter-account-celtics-ime-udoka-nba-005108447.html
Williams later tweeted that he wasn’t the one that made the original tweet, and that he has since changed his password: “As it relates to the Boston Celtics tweet that came from my account a couple of hours ago… I did not post that & my passcode has now been changed.”
So, this just keeps getting more bizarre, and it’s one of the weirder “I was hacked!” claims in Twitter history.
If we want to try to believe the hacker excuse for even a second, well, that would be a *really* random thing for a hacker to decide to tweet.
https://twitter.com/JohnnydNba/status/1407847270041767938
And assuming this was indeed simply an incorrect tweet from Williams, why not just say something like, “Oops, I spaced out and was very wrong. My bad!”
People will accept that explanation and honesty more than the eyerolling “I was hacked!” stuff.
About Matt Clapp
Matt is an editor/writer at The Comeback and Awful Announcing.
He can be reached by email at mclapp@thecomeback.com.