Ramona Shelburne
THE PHOTO ITSELF is one of many that hang in Sam Presti’s office. Legendary football coach Bill Walsh is laying on the ground, hands behind his head, seemingly at peace with whatever was about to happen in the Super Bowl his San Francisco 49ers were about to play. Not because he was eminently confident that his team would win.
Because he was prepared.
For as long as he has worked from that office as the executive vice president of the Oklahoma City Thunder Presti, that photo has hung as a reminder, as something to strive for. But when the time came for him to relax, to trust in everything he’d done to craft and prepare his team for its championship moment in Game 7 of the NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers, as Walsh had done before that Super Bowl, Presti did something entirely different.
The night before the biggest game of his professional life, he went home and rocked out on his drum set.
Everything it had taken to build and then rebuild this Thunder team coursed through the music. Everything he’d learned from the rise and fall of the Kevin Durant-Russell Westbrook-James Harden teams, lessons that have informed the rebuild around this new trio of stars: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren.
Presti is always thinking about building.
Except when he is playing the drums.
“There’s a different part of your brain,” Presti told ESPN. “That you have to access.”
That part of his brain is how this Thunder team is different.
Both teams were young. Both teams had a fashion-forward, ball dominant point guard. Both had a skinny 7-footer with guard skills. Both had an eccentric wing player who could open up a whole new world with his drives to the basket.
The physical similarities are so striking, it was almost as if Presti put a casting call out for look-alikes back in 2019, but screened for one important difference.
This time Presti cast for humility instead of swagger.
The first three superstars grew too big for one team and eventually each needed a bigger pot to grow in. They were as competitive with each other as they were with their opponents. They had swagger and ambition and egos.
The three stars who brought home the Thunder’s first championship Sunday night delight in sharing the spotlight with each other. So much so that they bring the whole team into their interviews on the court after games.
When ABC’s Lisa Salters presented Gilgeous-Alexander with the Finals MVP award, she asked about his partnership with one of his co-stars, Jalen Williams. As she did, he extended his left arm to pull his teammate into the ceremony with him.
He paused, collecting himself.
“Jalen Williams … is a one-in-a-lifetime player.
As the crowd erupted, Gilgeous-Alexander paused again.
“One second, sorry,” he said. “One second, sorry.”
“Without him, without his performances, without his big-time moments, without his shot-making, defending, everything he brings to this team, we don’t win this championship without him.
“This is just as much my MVP as it is his.”
After Williams took his turn raising the gleaming trophy above his head, he gave it back to Gilgeous-Alexander, who began to share it with his teammates.
“Pass it around,” he said. “Pass it around.”
Within the walls of Paycom Arena, and even outside of them, it is an ethos.
“Our togetherness on and off the court, how much fun we have, it made it feel like we were just kids playing basketball,” Gilgeous-Alexander said.
In many ways that’s exactly what this team was. Kids playing basketball. The youngest team to win an NBA title in nearly 50 years. Williams, 23, was just 10 years old when Durant, Westbrook and Harden were losing to LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the 2012 Finals. Too young to understand the parallels of that team to this year’s team.
So young that he took his first drink of an alcoholic beverage Sunday night in the champagne celebration in the Thunder locker room.
“That was my first drink,” Williams said in the hallway afterward. “Ever.” So young that none of them even knew how to open the champagne bottles until 31-year-old Alex Caruso showed them how.
“I’m old because they just haven’t been around anybody over 30 before,” Caruso joked afterwards. “It’s weird.”
But Presti remembers those 2012 Finals. He remembers all of it. And all of it has informed how and why he built this team differently this time.
There are so many sayings printed out on the wall of Presti’s office, next to that photo of Bill Walsh at the Super Bowl. So many sayings, all printed out in black capital letters on white magnets.
CHARACTER IS FATE.
TO BUILD IS IMMORTAL.
AGILITY IS THE QUALITY OF AN OPTIMIST. These are sayings he’s come up with or read somewhere or heard somewhere.
POST TRAUMATIC GROWTH.
HARDER BUT SMARTER.
INFORM THE MUSIC.
Presti got that last one from a documentary on Fleetwood Mac. Lyndsey Buckingham said it when he was talking about everything that went into their album, ‘Rumors.’ Presti doesn’t watch TV, but he’s watched countless music documentaries.
“I just like how art is created,” he said. “I like to understand how things are created and built and all the different stories behind the creation. And I like to know about the people that are putting that stuff together. What’s inspiring them and what’s bringing that out of them. And then it’s memorialized and that’s their statement. That’s their statement of the time.”
Presti has been thinking about his statement, for this time, for a while. What he would say up on the championship dais, if the Thunder managed to win the title. He was cautious, as he always is, about getting ahead of himself; the blowout loss in Game 6 had humbled everyone in the organization.
But he was also, of course, prepared.
“These guys represent all that’s good at a young age,” he said. “They prioritize winning, they prioritize sacrifice, and it just kind of unfolded very quickly. “Age is a number. Sacrifice and maturity is a characteristic, and these guys have it in spades.”
ALL SEASON THE biggest question about this Thunder team was whether they were too young to win. Whether they’d blink against a more seasoned opponent. Whether the pressure of winning the sixth most regular season games in history (68) would weaken their stomachs. Whether they could win close games after winning by the largest point differential in NBA history.
The 2012 team faced similar questions. Durant and Westbrook were both 23, Harden was 22, and just like this year’s team, it seemed like they’d have opportunities to win championships for the next decade.
“I thought we’d be winning two or three championships,” former Thunder guard Reggie Jackson told ESPN. “But our story didn’t go as expected.”
That first year they simply weren’t ready to win, while LeBron James and the Miami Heat were. The Heat had lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the Finals the previous season and spent all year thinking about what they’d do differently if they had another shot at it.
That’s what most assumed would happen for the Thunder after losing in 2012. They’d be back again, lessons learned, ready to win. Back then Presti believed his job was to maximize the window to win once his stars hit their “prime,” around age 26 or 27, just as the San Antonio Spurs — the organization that had raised him — had done with Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker.
His homegrown threesome was still a few years away from that, which meant preserving financial flexibility in the short term.
So when Harden came up for an extension that summer, Presti took a measured approach. He offered him close to the maximum, but not the full maximum, hoping that Harden would sacrifice a little for a larger common goal.
Harden had other ambitions though, personally and financially. He’d spent the 2012 Summer Olympics listening to stars like Kobe Bryant and Chris Paul tell him how talented he was, and encouraging him to lead his own team.
In the end, the Thunder’s offer of four years, $55 million was just $5 million short of a full max extension. And more importantly, it would’ve put them over the luxury tax they were so diligently trying to avoid.
Once Harden turned down that offer, Presti felt he had to trade him to keep the long-term plan intact. But also because sacrifice was a key tenet of the culture he was trying to build.
On Sunday night, Presti used that word twice when he made his statement on the championship dais.
That is the second lesson Presti learned from his first build. Maturity is a characteristic. Age is just a number.
The first time around he’d been too wedded to the idea that the time to win was when his stars hit a certain age. There was data behind that idea, as there always is when Presti commits to something.
But he hadn’t left enough room for an alternate reality to present itself — a reality that smacked him upside the head this time around, the more he watched how quickly this team came of age and how mature they already were.
“They’re young, but their maturity, selflessness, and true love for one another is really unique and special,” Presti said in an interview with ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt Sunday night. “The age is what it is. They’ve never let that define them.”
There are newer magnets up on his office wall to reflect that shift.
IN ORDER TO BE EXCEPTIONAL, YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO BE THE EXCEPTION
0:46
JWill: ‘Sam Presti has the best rebuild in the modern NBA era’
Jay Williams gives general manager Sam Presti and the Thunder their flowers after winning the NBA Finals.
MARK DAIGNEAULT HAS been to Presti’s office so many times he’s not overwhelmed by it anymore.
Presti had groomed him to be the Thunder’s head coach, much like RC Buford, Gregg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs groomed him to run a front office two decades earlier.
Presti always liked the way Daigneault carried himself, how he talked about the game and how his mind worked. He found him on the back bench of Billy Donovan’s staff at the University of Florida and brought him to Oklahoma City to work with the team’s younger players.
For five years Daigneault ran the Thunder’s developmental program, the Blue. He loved coaching the Blue and still wears their gear to Thunder practices sometimes.
“I hated leaving the G-League,” Daigneault said. “Ask my wife. She’ll tell you how much I loved it.”
Presti could see it, too. And the more he was around Daigneault, the more he could envision him as the leader of his next rebuild.
So he went out on a road trip with the Blue to observe more closely and evaluate whether Daigneault could be a future head coach.
“I had no idea,” Daigneault said, when asked if he understood he was being considered for such a promotion. “I wasn’t thinking that was a possibility at all. I just loved coaching in the G-League.”
The Blue practice at the Thunder’s original facility, a rollerskating rink downwind of the Purina dog food plant. Every player who comes through the program talks about the smell.
Earning a promotion from the Blue to the Thunder means never having to smell that again. But in Daigneault’s second year as head coach, he wanted to ground everyone in it.
The team had gone 22-50 the previous season, a huge departure from the 50-win team that nearly knocked off Harden’s Rockets in the 2020 playoffs.
After that season Presti began the full rebuild in earnest, trading away Chris Paul to the Phoenix Suns and replacing Donovan with the young player development specialist, Daigneault, at the front of the bench.
Players showed up on the first day of camp in the fall of 2021 surprised to see buses parked outside, waiting to take them to the Blue facility. This was where the first Thunder teams practiced after the franchise moved from Seattle in 2007. So this was where this group would begin, too.
It was a motivational tactic, not a punitive one. And it was memorable.
“My rookie year we did a whole thing,” Aaron Wiggins told ESPN. “We just kind of went through the way that they were able to pave the way for us to be here, and we acknowledged everything they went through, different parts of the history and. where Oklahoma City started. “Our coaching staff just wanted to prioritize that baseline.”
Daigneault has a favorite line from all the magnets in Presti’s office. Each time he goes in there, he notices something different. But the one that sticks out comes from a speech Christopher Walken delivers in the movie, Poolhall Junkies.
SOMETIMES THE LION HAS TO SHOW THE JACKALS WHO HE IS.
THE SUMMER OF 2019 marked the unofficial end of the first Thunder era and the beginning of this one.
That was the summer Westbrook was traded, according to his wishes, to the Houston Rockets, seven days after Presti had traded Paul George, also per his wishes, to the Los Angeles Clippers in a deal that would bring back Gilgeous-Alexander, the draft pick that later became Williams and a treasure trove of picks that jump-started the Thunder rebuild.
Presti had no idea he’d just traded for a future MVP and All-NBA player.
He thought Gilgeous-Alexander would be good. He hoped he might be very good one day. But league MVP? No way.
In April of 2022 Presti told a story about the first day he saw Gilgeous-Alexander at the Thunder facility after that trade. It was late and he was exhausted, emotionally and physically, after wrapping up the Westbrook trade. But he heard a ball bouncing somewhere in the facility and looked out an office that had a window to see Gilgeous-Alexander getting some shots up.
“He didn’t even have Thunder gear on,” Presti said. “That I remember because I was like, ‘Why doesn’t this guy have Thunder gear on? What is this? What kind of shop are we running here?
“It was ironic to me, and I thought, if this guy ever becomes a player, I’ve got to remember this story.”
Presti didn’t tell this story until after the 2022 season when Gilgeous-Alexander had established himself as a rising star in this league and the Thunder had won 44 games to earn their way back to the play-in tournament.
Even then, he didn’t realize how much more Gilgeous-Alexander would grow. Nor did he understand what an aberration it was to see Gilgrous-Alexander dressed so simply.
This was the bottom of a long climb they both were about to make. For the future MVP, it was a low moment; it hurt him to be traded. He questioned whether he had a flaw that caused it, and the only way he knew how to deal with that feeling was to go to the gym and work through it.
Gilgeous-Alexander rarely talks about that feeling of rejection, but on his way through Los Angeles this season he did.
“Their front office made a trade that they thought was the best for their team,” he said. “Same with the Thunder. Then the last five years I’ve tried to focus on my development and the team’s development. I’ve tried to be the best basketball player for the Oklahoma City Thunder. And I’d say that it worked out in my favor.”
Gilgeous-Alexander never is dressed down like he was that first day in the gym after the trade.
Growing up his mother Charmaine Gilgeous wouldn’t let her sons leave the house until they, ‘fixed up,’ as she used to put it.
“Growing up we’d always try to dress and look the part,” Gilgeous-Alexander told ESPN last season.
“You step out of the house, you look the part. You’re representing the family. And that kind of transferred into what it is now.”
He has twice been named GQ’s most stylish player. He plans out his outfits weeks in advance and is as meticulous about the details as he is about eating a red apple before games.
Of course he planned what he would wear to the game when he could win his first NBA championship.
“Yeah, but once I was in the moment, I just wanted to win so bad that I just put something together quick,” Gilgeous Alexander told ESPN.
By his standards, the black leather pants and dark grey sweatshirt he wore to Game 7 were rather bland.
“It was supposed to be so much louder than this, but this morning I woke up and all I wanted to do was win, so I didn’t even have time to put effort into that.
“I was just like, ‘Let’s just go win this thing.'”
PRESTI HAS A very different kind of vibe in his home office in Oklahoma City.
It is modeled after the cabin in which Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1845.
Presti grew up in nearby Concord, Massachusetts, and has visited the site and studied Thoreau’s work for years.
There is no technology in Presti’s room. Just a desk, bare walls and floors. Out back there is a deck overlooking a stream.
Thoreau once wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
Presti comes to this place deliberately, too.
To think without overthinking.
As an antidote to all the magnets with all the lessons he’s learned on the wall.
As an escape from the Bill Walsh photo and the architecture books by Frank Lloyd Wright and Bauhaus master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe he’s read that are neatly arranged on his desk.
It’s quiet. Spartan. Simple. And sometimes that’s the best place to build from.
This time he built differently, to last. He chose players who grew together, not apart.
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