As Thunder coach Mark Daigneault has become one of the league’s best young coaches, his journey started back in Leominster, where he grew up. He climbed up the coaching ranks all the way to the NBA as the Thunder’s top guy.
Now, he’s led the Thunder to what’s already been a historic season. Oklahoma City won a franchise record 68 wins in the regular season and is in the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012. The Thunder are just four wins away from immortality. Game 1 of the NBA Finals against the Pacers is set for 8:30 p.m. Thursday in Oklahoma City.
“It’s awesome for everybody,” Daigneault said at Finals media day. “Every single person that’s participating in this, whether it’s coaches, players, staff, there was a time in their life when this was just a dream. This wasn’t a foregone conclusion for them. That’s every player that’s participating. There’s a time when they were in their driveway shooting one-on-oh with a basket counting down the end of the game.”
Daigneault grew up in Leominster before making his way to UConn for college, where he was a student manager under Jim Calhoun. From there, Daigneault started his coaching career as he was at Holy Cross for three seasons and Florida for four years.
Daigneault made the jump to the pros when he was named the head coach of the Oklahoma City Blue, the Thunder’s G League affiliate, in 2014. He spent five seasons as the head guy there before getting the promotion to become the Thunder’s head coach in 2020.
Since then, it’s been a slow grind to the top. The Thunder missed the playoffs in Daigneault‘s first three seasons, winning 22 (out of 72), 24 then 40 games. The breakout season was 2023-24 as the Thunder announced their presence by going 57-25 to nab the No. 1 seed in the West. Daigneault was named 2024 NBA Coach of the Year for that season.
“There were very early flickers,” Daigneault said. “Even in those early years, those were challenging years at different times. Certainly they looked like challenging years on paper. How it felt every day was not a reflection of our record or where our standing was in the league. You could feel that something was starting to simmer. You could feel that some of the seeds we were planting were going to be flowering at some point. There were very early indications of that even in those seasons.”
While the Thunder lost in the second round in the 2024 playoffs, it was clear they had something brewing in Oklahoma City. The Thunder stockpiled picks and assets for years. They now feature the MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, an All-NBA guy in Jalen Williams and a loaded roster with plenty of talent.
So the Thunder, the league’s best team this year, have a chance to be remembered forever — and they’re set up well for the future. They already dominated the league on their way to a 68-14 record. Daigneault, 40, is also one of the youngest coaches in the league as he’s already found success he’ll look to sustain beyond these Finals.
“We were confident, even back then, not necessarily that we’d be in the Finals right now,” Daigneault said. “You never know the timing of when things come together. But we were confident that we were building something special and something that had the ability to sustain. As time went on, there were just more and more experiences that gave us more and more confidence in that. But that belief existed at the earliest point in time.”