Oklahoma City Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault was asked about Los Angeles Lakers’ superstar LeBron James’ comments about Thunder GM Sam Presti during All-Star weekend.
“The MVP over there is Sam Presti. He the MVP. I mean, Josh Giddey is great, but Sam Presti,” said James. “I don’t understand this guy’s eye for talent. He drafted KD, Russ, Jeff Green, Serge Ibaka, Reggie Jackson, Josh Giddey and the list goes on and on and on. This guy’s pretty damn good.”
Here is Daigneault’s full response when asked about it on Tuesday:
“I’ll start by saying LeBron and I see eye to eye on many things. Including that one, I have a lot of respect for Sam as well. A lot of my appreciation for Sam comes in the nuances of working with him. I think people that are great at what they do and that are great craftsmen, they’re good because of what’s invisible. They’re good because of what’s invisible. They’re good because of what’s boring. They do the consistent, boring, invisible things at an extremely high level and I worked with Sam for almost a decade now and have seen that up close and have only gained appreciation for it. You notice more and more as time goes on and the guy’s just got unbelievable determination, he’s got unbelievable attention to detail. He’s all about resourcing and putting everybody in the organization in positions of advantage to do their best work. He’s got unbelievable ability to, like I said, restrain himself and be patient in a very emotional and reactive environment. But he also doesn’t allow that to paralyze him when it comes time to get aggressive and it comes time to take a calculated risk and I think he’s got an unbelievable balance of that. I can give you countless examples of what makes him great but I think if you had to condensed it down to one thing, it’s that he does the invisible work very well, he does the details very well and he allows the cumulative effect to that to add value to the organization from his job and that gives all of us a really good example to follow in our jobs. I have way more insight on him than LeBron does and my respect is only higher with that insight.”
Based off of that long answer, it’s fair to say that Presti and Daigneault both respect each other very well and that there is a lot of organizational synergy going on within the Thunder.
