NEW ORLEANS — It was the third quarter of Saturday’s Game 3. The Oklahoma City Thunder had seen a commanding lead sliced to 10 points by the New Orleans Pelicans, and center Chet Holmgren was due for his second-half rest. With a 2-0 series lead and a short-handed opponent, it would have been easy to play it safe and predictable.
But Thunder coach Mark Daigneault doesn’t do safe and predictable. Instead, he saw an opportunity to do something very different: Insert Gordon Hayward at center. Gordon Hayward!
Not only had Hayward not scored a point all postseason, but he’s also profoundly not a center; he’s 6-foot-7, 225 pounds and blocked a grand total of one shot in his 26 games with the Thunder. Even by Daigneault’s standards, this was an extreme lineup; the other four players were guards Cason Wallace, Isaiah Joe, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams.
The Thunder extended their lead from 10 to 19 over the next four minutes, holding the Pelicans to just two points in that stretch, before Holmgren returned, effectively putting the game away despite their lack of size. The Pelicans reacted after one possession by pulling their own center off the floor, replacing Larry Nance Jr. with Dyson Daniels and effectively removing the original disadvantage Daigneault’s move created.
It kept with a lot of the themes that have made Daigneault a huge success in his four seasons on the sideline in Oklahoma City: Leaning in on small ball, keeping opponents off balance and offsetting some of his own teams’ deficiencies on the glass by chasing opposing big men off the court.
“Some of it is the opponent, if they give us a lineup if (we) think we can do that with,” Daigneault said after Sunday’s practice. “The other thing is, we want to be a little bit unpredictable. We want teams to watch us, New Orleans watching us right now, not knowing quite what we’ll do and when we’ll do it, (showing) a willingness to do it in a lot of different situations. It just expands the menu that they have to prepare for.”
The 39-year-old’s tactics paid off in being named NBA Coach of the Year on Sunday evening after leading the Thunder to a 57-win regular season and the top seed in the Western Conference playoffs. It was a 33-game jump in two seasons from the 24 they won in 2021-22, as well as the Thunder’s first 50-win regular season since Kevin Durant left in 2016.
Daigneault’s team leads New Orleans 3-0 and seems likely to win its first playoff series since 2015-16, but despite the announcement coming on an off day in the series, Daigneault said he and his staff had “no plans” for the 5:30 p.m. local time frame when the news came. Indeed, the TNT broadcast showed Daigneault in what looked like a regular hotel room rather than throwing back celebratory shots on Bourbon Street.
Talent acquisition, of course, has a lot to do with this award. The Thunder front office under Sam Presti rebuilt the fading and expensive post-Durant core by trading Paul George for Gilgeous-Alexander, drafting Williams with one of the five first-round picks acquired in the trade and nabbing Holmgren with the second pick in the 2022 draft, among other notable moves.
“I can’t win the games,” Daigneault said. “A coach can lose games, but I can’t win them.”
But even when the Thunder were bad, Daigneault stood out for rarely missing a trick to generate a small advantage, wrong-footing opponents with lineup shifts or defensive changes that rarely let his foes get comfortable. It stood in marked contrast to the auto-pilot eras under Scott Brooks and Billy Donovan, when the Thunder were a tactical open book that just counted on out-executing and out-talenting teams.
Daigneault has mastered the minutiae that nets extra tenths of points. Some of his moves might have been seen as longshot underdog strategies for a 20-win team that might not be suitable for a top seed, but Daigneault has kept things weird even as the Thunder have become dominant. In Game 1 against New Orleans, for instance, his traps on CJ McCollum at the end of the first and third quarters flustered the Pelicans into mistakes that took away last-shot opportunities. Those possessions proved critical in a two-point win.
As a newer generation of coach, Daigneault has some of the most nerd-friendly media sessions you’ll see in the league. He shows clear proficiency with data and analytics, often incorporating bits and pieces into his news conferences that hint at just how much he must be consuming in his down time.
Daigneault’s pregame media session before Game 3, for instance, included a bit about studying referee whistle tendencies before games and planning accordingly, and a reference to this chart about defensive stopper Luguentz Dort’s opponent matchup difficulty being the toughest in the NBA.
That Hayward move was another example of Daigneault’s analytical approach. He’s constantly talking about the trade-offs involved in the Thunder’s poor rebounding — they could play Bismack Biyombo or Mike Muscala if they really wanted to improve on the glass, for instance — and the fact that he’s willing to lose there because he thinks he’s coming out ahead on the bargain. Winning 57 games with the 29th-ranked team in rebounding tends to support that contention.
Of course, any discussion of Daigneault is incomplete without also noting his mastery of the challenge rule, which is why I keep calling him the Challenge Geaud on social media. He has not only used it as frequently — and correctly! — as any coach in the league, but also anecdotally has managed to train its use on the most high-leverage situations. While he had a high-leverage failure in this area in Game 1, he got back on his horse by winning one in Game 2; over the course of the season, Boston’s Joe Mazzulla is his only rival in the challenge game.
None of this matters if Daigneault can’t reach players or command a locker room, but by all accounts, he’s succeeded on this count as well. Player development has accelerated under his watch — nearly every core player has improved steadily over the past three seasons — and the young Thunder seem as together as any team in the league.
In the thankless world of NBA coaching, Daigneault’s challenge only gets more difficult from here, as the Thunder will have high expectations of championship contention going forward. How Daigneault fares in the postseason — where he only has five career games under his belt so far — will come to matter much more than his regular-season win total.
But consider this award a coronation of sorts for a young star in the profession. Coach of the Year trophies often over-index on short-term outliers, but this one is the exact opposite.
Daigneault has stood out since taking over in 2020; this honor just cements his place in the league’s upper crust.
(Photo of Mark Daigneault: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)
