Carlos Boozer pushes back on Kenny Atkinson COTY buzz: ‘He was gifted a team that already had All-Stars’

With the 2024-25 NBA regular season nearing a close, Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson stands out as a top contender to capture the Coach of the Year award.

However, former NBA star big man Carlos Boozer seems to believe that the award should go to Houston Rockets head coach Ime Udoka instead.

“Ime Udoka is the coach of the year,” Boozer said. “Nobody’s talking about that. Everybody wants to talk about Cleveland. He (Atkinson) was gifted a team that already had All-Stars on it.”

Boozer also mentioned former Cavs head coach J.B Bickerstaff — now the head coach of the Detroit Pistons — in the Coach of the Year conversation but appeared to favor Houston and Udoka.

The Rockets are on track to make their first playoff appearance since 2020 in Udoka’s second season leading the team from the sidelines. In Udoka’s maiden season as Houston’s head coach, the Rockets barely missed out on the play-in tournament, finishing as the No. 11 seed in the West with a 41-41 record.

Part of what makes Houston’s success this season so impressive is that the team had just one player earn an All-Star nod. Big man Alperen Sengun was selected to play in the All-Star Game for the first time as a pro in his fourth season in the NBA.

Conversely, a whopping three Cavaliers players were named All-Stars earlier in the season. Big man Evan Mobley along with guards Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland were selected.

However, Mitchell is the only perennial All-Star on the Cavaliers. He has six selections to his name. Garland has two, and Mobley has just one. Big man Jarrett Allen also has one, but he wasn’t selected this season.

Maybe Cleveland’s recent skid will come back to bite Atkinson in the race for the Coach of the Year award. The Cavaliers recently dropped four games in a row before snapping their losing streak with a victory over the Utah Jazz.

Cleveland is also no longer on track to finish with the most wins in a single season in franchise history. The squad would need to go 10-1 the rest of the way in order to finish with 67 wins and break the team record, a tough task without a doubt.

But Atkinson remains the betting favorite to win Coach of the Year honors. Bickerstaff is his closest challenger, while Udoka is a major long shot.

It should be interesting to witness how the race for the Coach of the Year award evolves as the regular season winds down in the coming weeks.