ATLANTA — On Friday evening, Damon Stoudamire was an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics who had just arrived in Atlanta for a Saturday night game against the Hawks. That’s when he received a call from a search firm. It was not out of the ordinary.
“I just assumed that they wanted to talk because there were some things possibly open,” Stoudamire said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Stoudamire was aware that Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner, a friend and colleague, had been dismissed earlier in the day after seven seasons. When he heard about it, he said the possibility of him being a candidate to coach the Yellow Jackets didn’t register with him. And he still didn’t even know what the call was for — or the purpose of a dinner that the search firm had arranged for that night — until he got in the car, Stoudamire said.
