Dubs Talk<\/a>, NBC Sports Bay Area\u2019s Warriors-focused show, he also served as the connective tissue between Daigneault\u2019s more serious, \u201call basketball, all the time\u201d approach and the rest of the roster\u2019s more playful, goofy outlook.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019ve known [Daigneault] longer than anybody else, and been able to be my true self around him at all times. I can be kind of a wiseass or sarcastic at times, and he\u2019ll be going through film or speeches, and I\u2019ll drop a little one-liner and break the tension and put everybody off, and he\u2019ll get a chuckle and hit me back with something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe does a great job of leading us and being serious when he needs to, and then we have our role of making sure that he\u2019s not too serious,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
Whatever the Thunder did, it certainly worked. They won 68 games in the regular season despite having the youngest roster in the league, then went 16-7 in the playoffs, surviving two Game 7s along the way, to win the title. In the process, they defied conventional wisdom that a team so young couldn\u2019t go all the way.<\/p>\n
OKC struck the perfect balance between remaining focused on the task at hand and having fun doing it. Though they were also the 1-seed in the West last year, they fizzled out in the postseason with a loss in the Western Conference semis. General manager Sam Presti traded for Caruso in the offseason, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s difficult to fathom given that they just completed one of the best seasons in NBA history, but the Thunder could be even better next year. SGA, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren have all been locked up to long-term extensions since the season ended, and Caruso will be back to tie it all together again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals just over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-29884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}