Before the Houston Rockets faced the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 1 on Saturday at 8:30 p.m. EST on, Bill Simmons put Ime Udoka in his hot-seat coach category and said he had not been impressed by the team’s coaching this season.
“The chemistry doesn’t seem great,” Simmons said, adding that the offense had been “bizarre” and that he would be very unsurprised if Udoka was not the Rockets’ coach next year.
The comments land at a time when the Rockets are trying to turn a promising season into something deeper. They finished 33-20 before the All-Star break and went 19-10 after it, then entered the postseason as a 3rd-year team still searching for a breakthrough. Houston has not advanced past the first round since 2019-20, when it reached the Western Conference semifinals.
Udoka’s path to this moment has been anything but linear. He led the Boston Celtics to the NBA Finals in 2021-22 in his first season as head coach, then was suspended for the entire 2022-23 season for what was called an inappropriate relationship with a female staff member. Joe Mazzula replaced him in Boston, and Udoka took over the Rockets in 2023-24. Houston reached the postseason in his second season, but lost in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs.
The scrutiny around the Rockets has not been limited to the bench. During All-Star Weekend, several stories linked Kevin Durant to a burner account on X that was critical of teammates Jabari Smith and Alperen Sengun. Durant had already admitted in 2017 to using burner accounts while he was on the Oklahoma City Thunder, and in 2021 the NBA fined him $50,000 for homophobic and misogynistic language in an Instagram DM exchange with Michael Rapaport. Durant dismissed the latest uproar as “Twitter nonsense.”
What happens next will be judged in the same place the Rockets always are this time of year: on the floor, under playoff pressure, with a coach already being openly discussed as a possible candidate to lose his job if the season ends short of expectation.
