i wish to return back to celtics…

In the NBA, teams quickly lose their competitive edge. Everyone strives to grow and expand quicker than their competition, therefore even the finest teams must be modified and reinvigorated.

When Ime Udoka replaced Brad Stevens, the Boston Celtics welcomed the change and forged ahead to become the finest version of themselves. They were ready to run it again, but Udoka was suspended and fired for an inappropriate working relationship.

“Formed a lot of relationships within a year and obviously want to get a chance to run it back with a group you feel you can build and grow with,” Udoka said Saturday, asking about his regrets before his first game back in Boston as the Houston Rockets’ new coach. “So, let’s

“I think no matter where you go when you take over a job, you have the difficulty of building trust, and buy-in has got to be the same,” Mazzulla said before his Celtics beat Udoka’s Rockets 145-113. “So I think at the end of the day, it was more about being patient and developing what my identity was and what I wanted to be.”

Earning buy-in was never going to be easy. Even though Mazzulla had plenty of fans in the locker room, it wasn’t even about the fact he was a back-bench coach the year before.

The players had their coach already and were tired of change. They finally had stability, and suddenly that was out the window.

They publicly lamented not knowing exactly why he was being suspended on media day in 2022, though Udoka said Saturday that wasn’t quite the case.

“I would say they lied to you guys,” Udoka said. “They knew, some of them knew, and you know obviously I could talk to them and they wouldn’t share stuff publicly, so who needed to know knew.”

Jaylen Brown said they thought they understood what was going on after speaking privately to Udoka, but then rumors started to swirl that there was more to the story before that eventually faded away.

“Definitely a peculiar situation or whatever,” Brown said. “But overall, I’m just happy to see him back on his feet, back coaching on the sideline where he belongs, and I was happy it ended up working out for both parties.”

The Celtics pledged they would work for and with their new coach, but there was just too much Mazzulla couldn’t control. It took a while for an optimized coaching dynamic to really take hold, and he just held on to his job after a tumultuous conference finals last spring. But the organization has fully aligned behind him, and the Celtics have looked like a Joe Mazzulla team all season.

“I think there (were) a lot of moments of it last year,” Mazzulla said. “You know, coaching three years from now, we might run a completely different offense, we might run a completely different defense. So I think it’s more about how do we build an alignment towards what we think the process of what we’re doing is the right way to go about it.