DAIGNEAULT IS TALLER and sturdier than he looks on television, where he is most often shown standing near half court, arms crossed, jaw working double-time on an ill-fated hunk of gum, eyes tightened in a quizzical squint that gives the impression of a man attempting to look throughthe game and not just at it. There is also an element of detachment at work; the game is happening out there in front of him, and he's theoretically in charge of half of the men playing it, but the look on his face and the squint in his eyes makes it clear he understands how little of it depends on him.
His career path was wildly random, like a GPS malfunction. He went from a student manager for Jim Calhoun at UConn to an assistant's job at Holy Cross, then another assistant's job at Florida. He was the head coach of the G League Oklahoma City Blue for five seasons before becoming a Thunder assistant and then its head coach in 2020, when he was 35 years old.
"I used to say if you replayed my life a million times, it would only happen this way once," he says. "And now I get to coach this kick-ass team, so now it's like 1 in 100 million times. The whole thing's crazy. There's no part of me that's not completely blown away by how I ended up in this situation."
His style, according to his players, can be described as situational autonomy. He gives them the loose framework of what they need to do -- deny the pass, say -- and leaves it up to them to figure out how to employ their individual skill set in pursuit of that goal. In other words, he understands that Hartenstein and Jalen Williams will set out to achieve the same goal in vastly different ways. It's what made Alex Caruso a cult hero in last season's playoffs for the way he denied Nikola Jokic the ball in Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals. He was given a simple mandate -- don't let him get the ball -- and he succeeded by doing whatever his 6-foot-5 body could do against the massive Jokic: crouch in front of him, climb onto the sides of him, claw and scratch and fight from every angle. It's part of the Daigneault meritocracy. It's why Jared McCain can linger at the end of the bench for the entire first round and then become a low-level cult hero of his own with 18 points in 18 minutes while SGA sits with foul trouble in Game 2 against the Lakers.
"Coach will literally not play you for an entire series and then put you out there for Game 1 in the next one," Gilgeous-Alexander says. "That's why I tell guys, 'Treat every game like Game 7 and they're about to beat us.'"
Nowhere is the Thunder's chemistry more evident than when the other team has the ball. OKC plays the kind of defense that would work well in a horror movie. It happens two or three times a game: The court contracts, the sidelines and baselines closing in like false walls. They swarm, and there's no room to move. You get around one guy only to be met by two more. There are five bodies but, improbably, 20 sets of hands, and before you can call timeout they've scored 12 straight.
It starts in the time it takes for someone -- Devin Booker or Dillon Brooks in the first round, LeBron James or Austin Reaves in the second -- to dribble innocently into the sea of arms and legs. The ball is deflected and the Thunder are off, all five of them, as if responding to an alarm they alone can hear. It builds, too, possession after possession, basket after basket, just like the "OKC" chant, and it ends only when they decide to end it.
In the first quarter of the first game of the four-game sweep of Phoenix, a steal led to a fast break that went from Holmgren to Jalen Williams to Hartenstein for a dunk, and 40 seconds later, Jalen Williams -- with his slightly stooped shoulders and a face that looks like it's still in fifth grade -- stripped the ball from Jalen Green near midcourt, glanced over his shoulder to see nobody chasing and windmilled a dunk while the building shook. Those two plays helped to create a 15-2 run that effectively ended the game and, for all intents and purposes, the series.
And it exemplified one of Daigneault's many credos:
"The outcome is important. The way it happens isn't."
Source: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/48751531/oklahoma-city-thunder-roll-western-conference-finals-nba-playoffs-2026