Sam Presti put Oklahoma City‘s first NBA championship team together in an unconventional way.
The Thunder general manager didn’t make any splashy trades or break the bank in free agency. He didn’t replace the coach with a bigger name during the rebuild to get the team over the top. He relied on good-old-fashioned internal development, with a few strategic additions sprinkled in.
It worked. Somehow, Oklahoma City claimed the title with the same coach and many of the same players who won 24 games four years ago.
“We have people from Canada, Serbia, the West Coast, the East Coast, middle America, France, Australia, that all come together for a collective goal,” Presti said. “There’s compassion on the team. There’s a cowboy toughness, a self-reliance that comes from being homegrown, and an essential sense of goodness.”
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was the regular-season and Finals MVP, but there were plenty of challenges. Jalen Williams, a first-time All-Star, was a force in the playoffs despite playing the entire postseason with a ligament tear in his right wrist that will require surgery. Chet Holmgren missed 50 games this season with a pelvic injury. The Thunder were among the league’s leaders in games lost to injury.
Presti said the key was that the players saw challenges as opportunities. Many took advantage of their additional playing time and were better prepared to contribute during the title run.
“If you want to be the exception, you have to be willing to be exceptional,” Presti said. “That point was basically aimed at the fact that we have to be the exception to the rule. … The quest to be exceptional is met with having to do a lot of things that are unorthodox, and I felt like the team did that in a lot of ways, and we were rewarded for it.”
Coach Mark Daigneault, like the team, is an unconventional success story. He coached the team’s G-League affiliate before taking over the Thunder. After winning fewer than 25 games in his first two years as OKC’s head coach, he’s now a champion.
Presti said Daigneault has improved over the years, and his approach to learning helped the young team stay focused. He said the team never got overwhelmed by circumstances, like losing Game 1 in both the Western Conference semifinals against Denver and the NBA Finals against Indiana, or falling apart in Game 6 at Indiana.
“I think the team saw those as, ‘Hey, this is just the next thing in front of us that we have to accomplish to achieve the goals of being a great team,’ and I don’t think anyone was inconvenienced or saw that as a catastrophic event,” Presti said. “It’s like, ‘Well, I guess this is part of the thing we have to get better at,’ and they met the moment.”
Two additions were guard Alex Caruso, who was acquired in a trade with Chicago last summer, and center Isaiah Hartenstein, who was added through free agency. Those veterans played key roles in the playoffs and helped Presti get named Executive of the Year.
Presti said the Thunder won’t change much — he believes consistency brought them here. The team is positioned to do well going forward with all the key players from the youngest team to win a title since 1977 signed through at least next season.
But Presti said there is work ahead. He noted that no team has repeated since Golden State in 2017 and 2018.
“We’ll have to put our head down,” he said. “We’re not entitled to anything. If you hear us approaching things differently than we have in the past, I’d be a little bit surprised by that. But we’re going to have to fight some human nature there, but I think we have the people and the characters and the program to fight for that. But we’re going to have to stack days in order to stack seasons.”
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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