Steve Kerr and Ime Udoka have more than a little in common. Both have ties to San Antonio—Kerr was a key role player on the Spurs’ championship team in 2003 while Udoka cut his teeth as an assistant under Gregg Popovich from 2012-19 (he also played for them from 2007-09 and again from 2010-11). Kerr and Udoka also served on Popovich’s Olympic coaching staff last summer, helping the Americans win gold in Tokyo.
Just as Kerr did with the Warriors in 2015, Udoka reached the Finals in his first season as an NBA head coach, guiding the Celtics to series victories over Eastern Conference heavyweights Brooklyn, Milwaukee and Miami. Udoka, who finished a respectable fourth in Coach of the Year voting this past season (Monty Williams was the runaway winner, garnering 81 of a possible 100 first-place votes), had his work cut out for him Thursday against a rested Warriors team with homecourt advantage and a combined 123 games of Finals experience (no Celtic had ever reached the Finals before this season). A herculean task was made larger when the NBA’s all-time three-point king Steph Curry came out scorching hot, exploding for a record six threes in the opening quarter. But Udoka never blinked, masterminding one of the great fourth-quarter comebacks in Finals history.
It all started with Udoka’s realization that playing big with Robert Williams and Al Horford on the floor at the same time wasn’t going to work. Udoka also found the antidote for Curry, riding the hot hand with Derrick White while benching Defensive Player of the Year Marcus Smart for much of the fourth quarter.
When Smart eventually returned, Udoka put him on Draymond Green while Boston continued to harass Curry with its switch-heavy scheme. The Warriors’ offense evaporated with all the threes that were going in earlier in the game no longer falling. The Warriors were done for once Horford came alive in the fourth, burying Curry and company with a scoring frenzy rivaled only by his out-of-body experience against Milwaukee earlier this postseason.
Udoka’s strongest trait may be his ability to adjust on the fly, improvising like a jazz musician. The rookie coach was Miles Davis Thursday night, offsetting Golden State’s speed advantage (up until the fourth quarter, the Warriors had been killing Boston in transition) with the rarely-used backcourt tandem of White and Payton Pritchard. Rather than force the issue with Grant Williams, a non-factor in his 16-minute cameo (zero points on 0-of-2 shooting), Boston went to a small-ball lineup, making the Warriors pay for leaving White and Pritchard wide open.
Boston’s fourth-quarter barrage was made more impressive by the fact Jayson Tatum, a first-team All-NBA selection and the Celtics’ leading scorer each of the past three seasons, was virtually nonexistent, laying an egg with 12 points on nightmare 3-of-17 shooting in his Finals debut (though he did dish out a career-high 13 assists).
While Udoka concocted his latest plan, Kerr sat idly by, watching the Warriors go down in flames. Blinded by his loyalty to former Finals MVP Andre Iguodala, an anemic shooter who has barely played this postseason (Thursday was his first appearance in 12 games following a neck injury suffered against Denver in Round 1), Kerr inexplicably abandoned what was working earlier in the game as the Warriors succumbed to costly mental lapses and turnovers galore. Kerr’s biggest mistake may have been his decision to sit Curry for much of the second quarter after going nuclear with 21 points in the opening period. That allowed Curry to cool off, never quite recapturing his dominant first-quarter form.
While the Celtics showed a sense of urgency, sprinting to the finish line with a seismic fourth quarter, Green essentially laughed it off, dismissing the Celtics’ late scoring binge as an anomaly, a mere outlier in a game the Warriors otherwise dominated. While Green may be right that Boston’s torrid three-point pace (21-of-41 shooting) is unsustainable, with Udoka steering the ship, you can guarantee the Celtics will be ready for whatever the Warriors throw at them Sunday night.
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