After Brad Stevens went into the front office, the Celtics are in the process of negotiating a deal to bring Nets assistant (and former assistant with the Spurs and Sixers) Ime Udoka to Boston to be their next head coach. The move came as no surprise to many, as Udoka has long been seen as a potential NBA head coach.
While this isn’t shocking, it’s nonetheless encouraging to see because there aren’t enough Black head coaches in the NBA; prior to Udoka’s appointment, there were just seven. The fact that the first of the seven current job openings went to a Black coach was important, but it was not a watershed moment for the Celtics franchise, which had the league’s first Black head coach in Bill Russell and won its most recent championship with Doc Rivers at the helm.
However, that didn’t stop ESPN’s Jay Williams from firing off this tweet that was later deleted on Wednesday morning.
Again, there are lots of reasons to rejoice for a young Black coach who has more than paid his dues and now gets the opportunity to lead a team, but this was simply incorrect. Williams delivered one of the all-time “I got hacked” justifications in Twitter apology history on Wednesday night, several hours later.
One of three things happened here: Williams is desperately trying to cover for an embarrassing tweet, Williams has someone in charge of his social media who made a very embarrassing tweet and has since been fired, or there is the world’s weirdest Twitter hacker who is hacking into famous people’s accounts, not to post anything crazy or vulgar, but to fire off bad and wrong takes that are causing them to lose their jobs.
I’ll leave it to you to judge which of those sounds most credible, but his excuse didn’t pass the Twitter smell test.
