“Calm persistence”

The Thunder way

Insight into the big questions of building a super team like: What were the Thunder looking for when they hired unheralded coach Mark Daigneault? SOOBUM IM/GETTY IMAGES

Back in June, when the Thunder were new champions, I wrote a story about how the Thunder’s long-term thinking outclassed most NBA teams’ impulsiveness. To me, at the time, the long view was the key.

That article also made fun of the architect of all this, Sam Presti, for being a total killjoy of an interview.

Just to be clear: that’s still going on. It’s not that Presti’s full Salinger. He does use words in public from time to time. But if a good story flies, Sam cakes that bird’s wings in mud. (Not long after I wrote that, Presti was an aggressive “no comment” on a fun Pablo Torre podcast episode about the music Presti once made.)

Presti isn’t very available, but he does take every question at the opening of training camp in the fall–a time when the national media tends to be spread thin, and so he’s really only talking to local reporters. At this fall’s press conference, a reporter asked what that was like for Presti, personally, to shell out a quarter-billion on contract extensions for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, and Jalen Williams.

The most helpful answer to a reporter on deadline would be any anecdote at all. I was walking into Shai’s house with the contract when the sprinklers went off! Short of that, it would have been easy to at least acknowledge the premise of the question, lives changed for the better, and as I’m not a computer, I feel that. Maybe it’s cool that Shai took a little less than he could have by signing a year earlier. Or what a fun day it was to learn that these big cool players love this uncool small city. Or you could just say something snappy and quotable like “next dinner’s on Shai!”

What Captain Fun said instead: “I mean, look, we’re, I’m always hesitant to talk about specific like negotiations or conversations. I think those things need to stay with the people that were included.”

We’re living a real-life story of people finding gold at the end of the rainbow, and you’re recapping the general value of privacy?

As Presti spoke, it wasn’t such a huge story. Alas, as Christmas approaches, the Thunder are on pace to be the best team of all time, it’s starting to seem like “how do the Thunder do it” might be a key NBA question for the next several years.

And so I went back and listened, and it turns out, this year Presti has pulled back the curtains just a tad more than usual. For example, Presti spoke about how, at the beginning of their title season, they were working in some new personnel and approaches. They did very well, winning 15 of their first 20 games, but you could see in the advanced statistics that the offense had taken a step back.

That is the beauty of an 82-game season and an approach to improve or discover the team through the year. By the end of the year, we found some different things that work for us. The worst thing for us to do is, at the first sign of any type of resistance, we default back to what worked last year, right? So, you know, by the end of the year, we found some really good things. We also had some players during the year that weren’t playing at their best level. I would say that best level, because no one can play at their best level all the time. They weren’t at probably like their C level, you know.

But that’s a sign of a pro is you work yourself through those things, and I think for us as an organization, creating the atmosphere and the environment where we can get those players back on track, getting them playing, you know, with small adjustments, it could be it could be just encouragement, but it could also be some small technical adjustments that take place. It’s a work in progress. I think that’s what makes the game great.

Presti said something about “so much overreaction” in how people talk about this sport. And he dug a bit into what is, to me, one of the most interesting questions of what I feel certain will be a dynasty: Why Mark Daigneault? He came to the Thunder’s G-League team with a killer pedigree, having worked under Jim Calhoun and Billy Donovan. But for a guy as particular as Presti, there must have been some philosophical alignment, right?