Ime Udoka: A Communications Collapse

When the Robert Sarver investigation finally dropped after a year of rumors, it felt like NBA fans had more than enough scandalous drama to sink our teeth into, but Ime Udoka and the Celtics had other ideas. At 10:35PM on Wednesday, Woj dropped the cryptic bomb that “Boston Celtics coach Ime Udoka is facing possible disciplinary action – including a significant suspension – for an unspecified violation of organizational guidelines. Discussions are ongoing within the Celtics on a final determination. ” Then, about an hour later, Shams tweets out that “Celtics coach Ime Udoka had an improper intimate and consensual relationship with a female member of the team staff.” The following morning Woj tweeted out essentially the same thing and notably confirming that it was a consensual relationship with a female staff member. Before I continue laying out the reporting timeline, let’s just take a moment to think about these tweets.

By this point in time, the Boston Celtics organization have made zero public statements addressing this issue. Not only that but Shams and Woj were tweeting about it in the middle of the night, giving pretty much every person in the Celtics a shit storm to wake up to. Now, to be fair, the role of journalists is not to think about the sleep schedules of the people they are reporting on, it’s to let the public know what is happening in a fair and objective manner. But journalists should also consider who their reporting is going to hurt people and if they can find a way to still report facts while keeping the humanity of their subjects in mind.

It’s clear that Shams and Woj were more obsessed with driving clicks to their websites than they were with the well-being of women in the Celtics organization. We have been living in the social media era for long enough to know that cryptic words on a sex scandal will send the Internet detectives into a frenzy. I will never forget watching Reddit detectives convince themselves that they found the Boston Marathon bomber before the FBI and that was almost a decade ago. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that a vicious internet mob will always rear its head in situations like this: where they have been given a tiny amount of information on an incredibly juicy topic. And, of course, this is what happened– NBA Twitter essentially turned into a days-long witch hunt tracking down all of the “female staffers” of the Boston Celtics. The role of responsible journalists and PR teams is to anticipate these kinds of responses and find ways to reduce the harm.

Let’s go back to the timeline of events real quick. On Thursday, the Celtics announced that Udoka will be suspended for the season. Then Shams dropped a bombshell article stating that:

“Some members of the Celtics organization first became aware of the relationship in July, sources said. At that time, team leadership was led to believe by both parties that the relationship was consensual. But sources said that the woman recently accused Udoka of making unwanted comments toward her — leading the team to launch a set of internal interviews.”

This was a huge development because it not only showed that the relationship was at least in part falsely reported to be consensual (again by both Shams and Woj) but also that the Celtics have known about the scandal for a while. Then, on Friday, pretty much everything becomes official and the Celtics hold a press conference to discuss it.

At the press conference Brad Stevens, the General Manager of the Celtics, was on the verge of tears talking about how damaging the past few days have been for the women in the Celtics organization. Stevens remarked that “no one can control Twitter speculation” and of course he is right to a certain degree. However, there were a ton of mistakes made along the way that only added fuel to the fire of speculation. 

The Boston Celtics completely mishandled this situation and have a lot of blood on their hands for the harassment of their female employees. The bottom line is that someone (or multiple people) from the Celtics got on the phone on Wednesday night and called up Shams and Woj to give them the scoop. This is despicable on two levels:

1. It showed lots of people in the Celtics knew about this highly private and personal scandal 

2. A front office exec essentially thought that the privacy of female staffers was less important that earning an IOU from Shams/Woj 

In a well run organization, most people in the organization will hear about this kind of a scandal at the same time as the public. Additionally, well run organizations will make sure that they are the first ones to get the word out. Being first allows an org to shape public conversation on these topics and mitigate harm. That is literally what the fields of PR and communications are dedicated to.

Many people have remarked on the morally irresponsible journalism from Shams and Woj but many other members of the media added fuel to Twitter fire. Richard Jefferson and Matt Barnes were some of the most egregious offenders instigators but there were many others as well. On Thursday, before the Shams article dropped, Jefferson tweeted, in clear reference to the Udoka scandal, “When you guys find out the truth 👀….”. How are fans supposed to react to that comment? This comment is essentially just inviting fans to open their horizons and speculate the most scandalous things they can think of. Then, on Friday, Barnes released a video where he stated, “I spoke on Ime Udoka’s defense and after finding out the facts I erased what I posted because this situation in Boston is deep, messy and 100 times uglier than any of us thought. Some things happened I can’t condone. It’s not my place to tell you what happened.” Again all this does is invite in further speculation! And then Jefferson quote tweeted the video saying “I know I was being cryptic yesterday ….. It was out of respect”. No Richard Jefferson, that is not a respectful thing to do! All you are doing is enabling the Twitter army! 

The Ime Udoka sex scandal has been a disaster class in communications. The way I see it, there are three main parties that have made this already bad situation worse. First, Shams and Woj showed their true colors– clicks over ethics. Second, the Celtics organization who let a leak happen over a situation that required a great amount of care, delicacy and privacy. Finally, the accidental instigators, such as Barnes and Jefferson, who invited in speculation from the Twitter mob through their cryptic comments. Do better, NBA.