New Celtics head coach Ime Udoka has begun to build his staff and one of his one of his top assistants will be someone with over a decade of experience within the NBA, Will Hardy.

Hardy comes to Boston by way of the Spurs organization, a place where he learned under the legendary Gregg Popovich. He began as many future NBA coaches do in the video room as the team’s video coordinator from 2013-2015 after finishing his playing career at Williams College. The Virginia native also served as head coach of the Spurs NBA Summer League squad from 2015-2018. Hardy has spent the last four seasons as an assistant coach on San Antonio’s bench.

His relationship with Udoka can be traced to the 2019 FIBA World Cup where he was on the coaching staff alongside the new Celtics head coach.

In a 2020 coaches panel, Hardy touched on what he learned from working in San Antonio.

“What helped me in San Antonio was access, transparency. They let me be in film sessions. There’s pretty much an open-door policy with the assistants that you work with,” Hardy told the online conference. “Brett Brown, when I worked with him in the video room, I sat in his office all day and almost watching him go through his process, asking him questions, he’d ask me questions, and starting to learn how he was getting to his answers. How he was evaluating a team we were going to play and how he was figuring out what he was going to do for the game plan. So I try to do that for any of the video guys that work for us now.”

Hardy is looking to help build the culture in Boston through hard, consistent work.

“If you’re not actually doing all those things every day, then your culture is nothing,” said Hardy. “So it’s always been about being selfless. Coach Pop says all the time, ‘Get over yourself. It ain’t about you.’ No one person is bigger than this and that goes from him all the way down.”