Mark Daigneault didn’t come to UConn to play basketball, and he didn’t join the basketball program just to hang out. That was readily apparent to those around him soon after he became a student manager in 2004.
“He was a kid that had a quiet maturity,” Jim Calhoun says. “It took me about halfway through the year to see, ‘this guy’s a little different. He’s not just a kid here to get tickets.”
Daigneault’s high school coach at Leominster, Mass., had played for George Blaney at Holy Cross, and with Blaney now Calhoun’s associate head coach, a recommendation was made. Once on campus, Daigneault’s industriousness, seriousness and curiosity left a mark.
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“I used to kid players and say, ‘hey, this guy right here is going to take basketball further than all of you guys,’” says Patrick Sellers, who was on UConn’s staff then and is now head coach at CCSU. “I would say that all the time because at a young age, Mark was poised, he was smart, he was mature beyond his years.”
Every corner of the basketball world is soon to learn of Daigneault’s pathway from Storrs student manager to center of the basketball universe, now that he has coached the Oklahoma City Thunder to the NBA Finals. The Western Conference champs play the Eastern champion Indiana Pacers beginning Thursday, with Game 1 at Oklahoma City.
“I don’t think he cares (about the spotlight),” says CCSU assistant coach Ben Wood, who was a student manager at UConn with Daigneault and has remained a close friend. “What makes him so good, he knows what he likes, he knows what he’s about and it’s not about all that kind of stuff. I don’t think it will affect him at all, he’s very grounded.”
Daigneault started out doing the usual student-manager chores for the UConn program, and Calhoun barely noticed him, or at least barely acknowledged him. Then with the Huskies going to New York for the Big East Tournament, Calhoun put his car keys in Daigneault’s hand and asked him to follow the bus to New York and park in the hotel garage, with a brusque warning not to screw it up. With Wood riding shotgun, the freshman from Central Massachusetts, with little or no big-city driving experience, followed the rather aggressive bus driver into the city, running lights to keep up through mid-day Manhattan traffic, and got Calhoun’s car there without a scratch, a story Daigneault recounts for Calhoun’s upcoming book, “More Than A Game,” in which (full disclosure) I am the co-author.
“Our whole experience looking back on it was pretty cool, being managers and just kind of learning on the fly,” Wood says. “That was the thing, being part of the UConn program, you had to figure things out pretty quickly, and the quicker you figured things out, the more responsibility, trust, respect you gained. Coach Calhoun says, ‘I trust you to drive my car,’ now you’ve got to figure out how to get it to New York City safely. There were a lot of things like that, how you figure stuff out and how you deliver. …With Mark, I couldn’t believe he was a freshman when we were both freshmen.”
As time went on, Daigneault began helping Blaney break down film and do scouting reports and sitting in on meetings in “The Bunker” with the assistants, always listening, always learning.
“I was trying to soak up everything I could from Coach Calhoun and Coach Blaney and Mark and Ben Wood were the same way,” Sellers says. “Mark came in and because he was Coach Blaney’s guy, he had some juice from day one. Coach Blaney would say, ‘Mark, do this, Mark, look at that,’ and Mark would just soak everything in he could, watch our workouts and after a while, he was doing our workouts. He would be with Coach Blaney, watching film, taking notes, doing the scouting reports. He just learned the game from one of the best guys to ever do it and he got a lot of confidence.”
When he graduated, Daigneault landed an assistant coaching job at Holy Cross. When that staff was let go, he enrolled in a master’s program at Florida and became a grad assistant with Billy Donovan. In 2014, after Donovan became the Thunder head coach, he brought Daigneault in to coach the G League affiliate across town. There, Daigneault caught the eyes of GM Sam Presti and when Donovan left and the Thunder undertook a ground-up rebuild, they entrusted Daigneault, just 35, with the NBA head coaching job.
BRYAN TERRY/AP
Mark Daigneault, former UConn student manager, now head coach of the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and in The Finals. “He commands the room.”
Sellers and Wood have made annual training camp trips to watch and observe as Daigneault slow molded the team.
“Coming into UConn, you’ve got the Rudy Gays and the Hilton Armstrongs and the Josh Boones and those guys,” Sellers says, “and as a young manager, those guys could be intimidating, but Mark would not be intimidated, super confident, really confident in how they approach them and he carried that over to OKC. You know, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, he’s the MVP, and I’m watching practice and Mark sees something he doesn’t like, he yells, ‘yo …. YO,’ I don’t even remember him having a whistle, he just says, ‘yo,’ and everybody stops and listens and he controls the room.”
Says Wood, “it’s eye-opening to watch them work, everything is detailed, organized, efficient. Really inspiring to watch.”
Pro teams often lay out long-term building plans, and sometimes commit to a young coach to build it, but not many have the patience to see it through. The Thunder resisted the quick fix and paid more than lip service to the fashionable phrase, “trust the process.” They were 22-50 in Daigneault’s first season, then 24-58, then 40-42. Last season, after the Thunder signed him to an contract extension paying a reported $4 million per year, Daigneault was NBA coach of the year as Oklahoma City finished 57-25, but lost in the conference semifinals. This season, they were 68-14 and have dispatched the Grizzlies, Nuggets and Timberwolves in the playoffs.
“You don’t want to be so wise that you’re over cautious,” Daigneault says, explaining his philosophies to reporters in Oklahoma City, “and you don’t want to be so confident that you’re overconfident. The confidence, the urgency and the wisdom, you need to hold those things in balance.”
They’ve done it with star power, like SGA, draft picks, and finding undervalued players, some undrafted like Luguentz Dort, and Daigneault has gained the reputation for using his bench and, with his staff, developing defense. Last week, Hall of Famer Rick Pitino posted on social media about his habit of showing his St. John’s team video of the Thunder’s defensive designs “at least three times a week.”
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“What Mark does, he keeps it simple,” Calhoun says. “That’s always been the philosophy. Run, rebound, defend the hell out of the ball, make sure the best scorer gets the most shots. We’d do the common, uncommonly well. And I saw Mark say, in so many words, ‘we know what we are, we play the way we play because it fits us perfectly and we have a team now that can do the simple things better than the team we’re playing.’”
The words Calhoun, Sellers and Wood all go back to in describing Mark Daigneault are poise and maturity. Calhoun has been in touch quite a bit during the playoffs, and said he has never been prouder than he was after watching Daigneault calmly, articulately address the media after the Thunder lost a one-sided Game 3 to Minnesota. “It was amazing just watching him talk,” Calhoun says. “Just the way he handled it. ‘We never got into what we needed to play the way we want to play.’”
The team, reflecting their coach’s steadiness, closed out the series. The NBA is widely considered “a player’s league.” Coaching in the middle of the country, in a small market, and not one for eye-popping statements or on-court histrionics, Daigneault has not yet become a household name, a coaching star. His profile figures to change — dramatically.
“Mark saw (at UConn), there was method to the madness,” Calhoun says “His madness is different, very calm, very reassuring, but he’s been coaching for a long time, with people who are older than him, more experienced than him in the NBA and he is well aware of that. Yet, you’re not going ask him a question about what he does and not get a good answer. … With Mark, he’s so much smarter than you may think he is because he doesn’t throw it around.”
