How OKC Thunder's Infamous Game 6 Loss to Warriors Still Impacts Mark Daigneault
The 2016 Western Conference Finals will be one for the NBA history books.
A league-shifting event that saw the Oklahoma City Thunder blow a 3-1 lead to the Golden State Warriors, who then suffered the same 3-1 fate in the next round to the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. That led to a parking lot phone call that left Kevin Durant skipping Bricktown for the Bay Area.
That series can be summed up with the phrase "Game 6 Klay", as Warriors star Klay Thompson blitzed in 11 triples on his way to 41 points, igniting a 108-101 win to send the series to a game seven.
While this game has been over-analyzed, long discussed and featured so many memorable moments, what sticks with OKC coach Mark Daigneault was an event that occurred before the game even started.
At the time, Daigneault was the organization's G League head coach, but with such a long postseason run, that staff came up to pitch in on NBA work once the G League season wrapped. “I wasn't really doing anything, just had the best seat in the house," Daigneault joked.
However, prior to the game, the Warriors flipped the court: the road team is in charge of deciding which basket they want to score on first and thus which basket they want to end on. All season long, the Warriors elected to shoot on the opposite side of their bench to close out games when they were the visiting team, until game six of the Western Conference Finals.
"The time [flipping the court] caught my attention was in game six [of the 2016 Western Conference Finals]. They flipped the court against us, the whole season they had done it the same way, and then they flipped the court and it just had a different feel to it ... I still do not know why they did it, but for me it had a different feel to it.”
To this day, Daigneault prepares for outcomes with that in mind.
“So from then on I just started flipping it more randomly because I think conditioning the team to be able to handle both is important." Daigneault said giving insight to how he handles the choice.
This is just another example of the Thunder bench boss practicing what he preaches, and wanting to equip the team to be as versatile as possible.
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