I posted this back in October last year, when Ime said one of his main goals was to stop Boston being a team that is always crying to the refs, about the refs. Remember how much Tatum used to cry to the refs? Then it started rubbing off on GWill and others. Ime said he was going to put a stop to it and for the most part he had. Until the Cs were jolted out of their comfort zone and that same bad habit surfaced.
I suspect the reason he wants them to stop crying to the refs is not necessarily because he doesn't want them to work the refs, but more so because he wants to control the controllables. A player crying about ref calls (a popular fan thing to do) is an out because it's something they can't control, so rather than take ownership of anything that doesn't go according to plan, it's easy to blame the ref and not take responsibility. Then when they lose the game they can just say "we wuz robbed". Fans can cry about refs all day, that's because we're sitting in our loungerooms. Players always crying about refs get distracted, they get resentful, and worse they may get in the ref's bad books and the decision they were crying about isn't going to be changed anyway.
This was a snippet from the Athletic back in October 2021.
Word around town was that first-year Celtics coach Ime Udoka was going to call you out if you messed up. Straight and direct, hard truths and all that tough stuff.
So after a preseason game in which one starter got a tech for complaining and another gave up an open and-1 dunk for doing the same, he didn’t hold back.
“The main thing I’m telling him (is) to get back and stop worrying about the referee. Your guy is bringing it right behind you,” Udoka said. “So that was part of it, but I think he did have his fourth foul as well. Just a learning moment. You can’t get caught up in that. You have to play through it just like they did. They played with pace.”
Grant Williams had been doing a decent job throughout the game staying ahead of the play and not falling into his bad habits of lagging behind and trying to foul his way out of trouble. After all, he has to be in the perfect position to make every play at his size.
But when Williams was called for a moving screen and stayed in the backcourt to complain to an official, Bam Adebayo ran ahead, the Heat got the ball up the floor quickly and Williams fouled Adebayo trying to catch up to one of the league’s most athletic centers.
Udoka called timeout and yanked him, but it wasn’t just for this isolated instance. A few minutes earlier, Williams was defending a two-on-one fast break and made a familiar error. Jimmy Butler was driving right at him while another Heat player was waiting on the other side of the paint. Williams could have tried to play the gap and then go straight up if Butler went to the rim.
But instead, he stepped way out past Butler and just aggressively grabbed him to try to commit the hard foul. That was already a mistake because he might as well do the right thing and try to defend the play for the sake of his development and to play the odds that he could get the stop. But it completely backfired because Butler is an unstoppable force and managed to somehow hit the layup anyway to get an and-1.
Williams was miffed, and it started a predictable backslide we’ve seen from him plenty of times. He looked noticeably more frustrated from there, and it culminated with him complaining about the offensive foul call and losing his awareness for a crucial moment.
“When we cried about calls, they were running out and got too many easy looks,” Udoka said. “So something like I said we talked about early in camp; it’s something I’m going to keep hammering away on until we get where we want to be.”
The least surprising ref interaction of the night was Jayson Tatum getting a tech for complaining. We’ve written here before about Tatum needing to work the refs better to start getting the star treatment when he attacks the lane, but obviously, he has to know how to toe that line so he isn’t giving up free throws.
“Yeah, it’s a common theme with us, and I want us to improve vastly in that area,” Udoka said. “When things started going bad in the second quarter, we didn’t get a few foul calls, we lost composure on the other end and started crying to the refs a little too much to get out in transition. We lost our focus on shooters, and I felt that was because of some of the foul calls.”
https://theathletic.com/2892902/2021/10/15/celtics-preseason-observations-ime-udoka-says-players-need-to-stop-crying-to-refs-after-loss-in-miami/