Ime Udoka Downplays Report Of Celtics Having Players-Only Meeting

For all the Boston Celtics’ problems last season, they kept things in-house, and not much ever leaked to the media.

But during their much-needed win against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported the team held a players-only meeting in the aftermath of Marcus Smart calling out the team on Monday.

To complicate things further, Wojnarowksi got the impression that the meeting was not particularly productive nor beneficial.

Following the game, head coach Ime Udoka downplayed the gathering, saying it wasn’t a players-only meeting at all.

“Yeah, it wasn’t really a players-only meeting,” Udoka said after the game via Zoom. “We had a team dinner scheduled way before anything happened, so that was planned for some weeks now. And we gave the players their time before the coaching staff and everybody else came down so they had about 30 minutes on their own but it wasn’t anything scheduled, it was wasn’t anything scheduled by them. It was what we already had planned and like I said, we gave them time to enjoy each other first before we came down 30 minutes later.”

So either someone inside the organization exaggerated the nature of the meeting to Wojnarowski or Udoka is downplaying the situation to avoid another mess. Neither would be surprising, but hopefully some progress at least came from it.