This past Sunday’s game against the Orlando Magic had a ton of draft lottery implications as the Oklahoma City Thunder and they are just separated by a game in the reverse standings for the third-best lottery odds. The Oklahoman’s Joe Mussatto decided to address the elephant in the room by asking Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault his thoughts on tanking and whether those types of discussions leak over in the locker room. To put it nicely, Daigneault shot the idea down, saying only fans and media discuss such things.
“One of the things that’s great about being part of a team, as much as we want to engage with you guys and our fans, there’s something sacred about the locker room, the priorities and the tightness in the circle.
“There’s a lot of people that aren’t in there, and it makes it a pretty exclusive place. I give our team a lot of credit, because I think our players, our staff have done a great job over the years — not just this circumstance — of just keeping our locker room our space, where we have our mindset, where we work on our fundamentals, our habits and we hone our mentality, and not get distracted by anything outside of that. That’s certainly not a focus of ours.”
Mark Daigneault on tonight as it relates to the lottery: pic.twitter.com/dntzakLweG
— Joe Mussatto (@joe_mussatto) March 20, 2022
Daigneault has been great with the media his entire tenure with the Thunder as he gives very thorough an thought out answers to almost all of his questions and this is no exception as he tackles on a very taboo topic for NBA players, coaches and GMs to talk about publicly.
Nothing Daigneault said should be that surprising; expecting players — especially ones who are young and fighting for their NBA career — to care about tanking and lottery odds is pretty unrealistic. They have every right to win as many games as possible as fans and front offices have every right to want to lose as many games as possible. Neither side are on the wrong here and both have justified reasons for their stance.
