OKC wouldn’t be champs without Daigneault
24 Jun 2025
Jenni Carlson Columnist
The Oklahoman USA TODAY NETWORK
Tucked in the far back corner of the temporary stage covered in blue and orange confetti, Mark Daigneault positioned himself as far as possible from the action, the interviews, the cameras and the celebration.
Leaning on the railing, he looked like he could’ve been observing a November shootaround.
It was an NBA Finals coronation instead.
Make no mistake, the Thunder coach was excited, thrilled, enthused — “I’m just so happy for the guys,” he said — and why wouldn’t he have all the feels after a 103-91 triumph over the Pacers?
But Daigneault’s disappearing act to the back of the stage was telling.
Even with the second-youngest team to ever win an NBA title, a bunch so young that several of its core players were old enough to drink the celebration champaign Sunday night but wouldn’t have been old enough to rent a car Monday morning, Daigneault never treated them like youngsters. He enabled them. He held them accountable. Then, he stepped back and let them become.
What they became is NBA world champions.
“His ability to collaborate with his assistants, then come together and have a clear, concise message for us is second to none,” Thunder veteran Alex Caruso said. “He does a great job of pushing buttons when he needs to push buttons. He does a great job of figuring out solutions to problems. Then he does a great job of holding people accountable, which is a huge thing in the NBA.”
There are lots of reasons Oklahoma City will spend the next few days celebrating its first world championship. You can start at the top with Clay Bennett and the ownership group, move to Sam Presti and the rest of the front-office staff, and then to Daigneault, the assistants, the support staff and, of course, the players.
But whenever Daigneault gets asked about how this team got so good so young so fast, he always defers to the players. Their upbringings. Their backgrounds. Their attitudes.
No doubt all of that is important. But so is Daigneault’s part in this team’s ascent.
Take the long view, and you’ll see Daigneault bringing the Thunder through the early years of its rebuild. Those teams lost a lot of games, but the players who were there say Daigneault never wavered from his core beliefs.
“He always taught me to play the game the right way,” defensive doberman Lu Dort said.
Putting Daigneault with Bennett and Presti, superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said, “They’ve done an amazing job of building an environment, a winning environment. It’s no fluke why we’re here and why we have so much success and why we’ve grown so quickly.
“Those guys have done a great job of just giving us a platform to be ourselves and be great, and we did so.”
But you can take a shorter view, and see Daigneault’s mastery, too.
In these Finals, he went toe-to-toe with Rick Carlisle, a head coaching handful. All that Carlisle did was get the upstart Pacers to the Finals, then despite being an underdog in every game, he figured out a way to push all the right buttons, make one of the most historically great teams in NBA history look pedestrian at times and get these Finals to a Game 7.
It was a masterclass on being a head coach in the NBA.
Even when Indiana’s Mr. Basketball, Tyrese Haliburton, went down with an Achilles injury in the first quarter Sunday, Carlisle and the Pacers managed to keep the game closer for another couple of quarters.
But Daigneault and the Thunder didn’t back down.
“One of the great young coaches in all of professional sports,” Carlisle called Daigneault after the game.
You’ll hear no arguments from the Thunder. The players felt Daigneault’s influence throughout the playoffs.
“There’s a lot of emotions, there’s a lot of ups and downs,” Dort said. “He’s been good at keeping us together. That’s the biggest thing; if you want to achieve something like (winning a championship), we’ve got to do it together. He did a great job of that.”
Thunder newcomer Isaiah Hartenstein said, “He’s very stoic in a sense. I think that helped us all … through the ups and downs in the playoffs. So, I think he’s amazing.”
But it wasn’t just Daigneault’s demeanor. After Gilgeous-Alexander’s poor performance in Game 6, for example, Daigneault was honest with the MVP.
“He told him how he needed to play better,” Caruso said. “He was really sticky. He needed to move the ball.”
In Game 7, Gilgeous-Alexander dished out 12 assists, a career-high in the playoffs, to go along with a gamehigh 29 points.
Daigneault demanded better, and Gilgeous-Alexander responded.
“I think that’s one of the unique things that Mark brings to the coaching aspect, is just his ability to not really care about … what the status quo is,” Caruso said. “He’s going to coach how he knows to coach. It’s the same way when he coached me when I was in the G League nine years ago. It’s probably the reason he’s had the success that he’s had.
“He’s true to himself.”
Even though he’s straight-faced during games — “Did he smile tonight when he came to talk to you all?” Caruso quipped Sunday night — Daigneault is followed and respected and listened to because of the connection that he develops with players. Go back as far as you want during his head coaching tenure, and you’ll find Thunders who sing praises about their relationship with Daigneault.
From Darius Bazley to Isaiah Hartenstein, the chorus is loud.
“He really cares about us,” Hartenstein said. “It’s like little details; we bring our kids around, he’s the first one to interact with them. If you have any problems off the court, he’s always open to talk to you.
“He’s really special, even in the short time, to me.”
The admiration is clearly mutual. Daigneault quipped about the players as they draped towels over his shoulders during his trophy-presentation interview after the Western Conference finals. And Sunday, as he was interviewed at the end of the Finals, a stack of black championship hats was placed on his head.
He’s jokingly called them goofy and idiots.
But Daigneault has long realized their greatness, too.
“Everyone says ‘The team is hard to coach,’ and usually, that has a negative connotation,” Daigneault said. “When you have a team that is this talented, professional, competitive, this willing to sacrifice, that’s the ultimate pressure on a coach because you want to serve that. They deserve that.
“But there’s no guarantee you end it the way that we did. I just wanted it so bad for them.”
And once they had it Sunday night, Daigneault wanted to step back and soak it in. But he also wanted to step back and let them take center stage because that’s what the Thunder coach did this season. He enabled them to become champions.
“That’s what gives me the most pride right now,” he said. “I feel like I was able to do that for them because they deserved all of this.”
Jenni Carlson can be reached at jcarlson@oklahoman.com.
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