Ticketed for a G League job after a regime change three years ago, assistant Will Dunn showed his value to stick with the Rockets’ coaching staff. This year, he served as the head coach for the Summer League squad.
Courtesy Rockets.com
St. Thomas players, from left, Thomas Sjoberg, Grant Shaeffer, Will Dunn, Jodan Burich and G.T. Johnson celebrate after St. Thomas won the 2016 NCAA Division III men’s college basketball championship game 82-76 over Benedictine in Salem, Va.
Don Petersen/AP
LAS VEGAS — Will Dunn was supposed to go down to the G League.
He’d been with the Houston Rockets since 2019, hired in basketball operations by then-coach Mike D’Antoni and promoted to a full-time assistant coach while working under Stephen Silas, who succeeded D’Antoni. But when Ime Udoka took the job ahead of the 2023-24 season, he planned to bring in his own staff, sending Dunn to work with Houston’s G League affiliate, the Rio Grande Valley Vipers.
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The 2026-27 season will be Udoka’s fourth coaching the Rockets. Dunn has been on each of his staffs. Houston named the 32-year-old as its Summer League coach and Dunn followed up by leading the Rockets to a 3-2 record, reaching the semifinals in Las Vegas.
Dunn’s professionalism, competitive fire and basketball acumen helped him stick with the Rockets. But his path also involved a self-described “lucky break” — more on that in a bit.
“It’s always kind of a gut check, a character check when your staff gets let go,” he said. “ … You can react a number of different ways.”
Some people retreat and just do their own thing until explicitly told they’re wanted. Others, trying keep their job, scramble to show their value. Dunn took a slightly different approach.
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Either he was going to work for Udoka or not but either way, he wanted to use the opportunity to develop relationships with the staff.
“At the very least, somebody might call them in a couple years and be like, ‘Hey, you were around Will Dunn for a couple months in Houston. How is he? ’” Dunn explained. “ … I went into it with just the mindset, like in five, six years, I want to be proud of the way I went about that situation.”
It helped that they saw the game in similar ways. One of Udoka’s keys when he coached the Boston Celtics was putting his shot-blocking center on the opponent’s weakest shooter. That allowed the player to roam on the weak side and protect the rim while the other four players switched all actions. One of the first key conversations Dunn recalled having with Udoka was telling him that he loved the strategy and wanted to employ it more with Rockets center Alperen Şengün.
Dunn’s experience as the head video coordinator with Houston also helped him stick around. Udoka was bringing in a new video room largely untested in an NBA setting, so the coach asked Dunn to hang around during training camp to teach the new guys before he went to the Vipers.
Dunn pulled double duty during camp and in the preseason, helping the Rockets while crafting plans for the Vipers.
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Around this time — and here’s where the luck really comes in — assistant coach Cam Hodges was recovering from leg surgery and couldn’t work with players on the court, opening an avenue for Dunn.
The Rockets kept pushing back Dunn’s move to the G League. Finally, around the start of the regular season, Udoka told him he’d be staying up with the NBA club.
“You don’t stay around eight years, three staffs without getting a ton of luck and a ton of good breaks,” Dunn said. “ … There’s a world where if Cam’s knee is totally healthy, I’m not with the Rockets to this day, or I might not even be coaching at this point. You just don’t know. You need a bunch of breaks for sure.”
An injury to fellow assistant Cam Hodges (center) led to Will Dunn (left) sticking on Ime Udoka’s staff with fellow assistant Ben Sullivan.
Brett Coomer/Staff photographer
Driving the bus
Here’s a brief scouting report of Dunn, delivered by Johnny Tauer, his former college coach at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.
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“He was not scoring 21 points a game,” Tauer said. “He was the guy oftentimes guarding the other team’s best player. He was going to take a charge. He was going to dive on the floor for a loose ball. He was going to take incredible joy in setting a screen or making the extra pass.”
Dunn first played college ball at Indiana –Purdue Fort Wayne before transferring to St. Thomas. He played three seasons with the Tommies, winning a Division III title in 2016.
Tauer recalled he and a friend watching Dunn play at a summer game in 2014 soon after the transfer. It didn’t take long before the friend turned to the coach and said of Dunn: “He plays Tommy basketball.”
Will Dunn, known as a glue guy at St. Thomas (Minn.), helped the Tommies win the Division III national championship in 2016.
Don Petersen/AP
Just about everything Dunn did, from how he pivoted to how he pass-faked to how he crouched into a defensive stance to how he communicated on defense, showed his desire to impact winning and knowledge of how to do so. Tauer soon realized that Dunn would want to get into coaching after his playing career. The first thing the longtime coach asks people when they express such a desire?
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“Do you understand what you’re getting into?” Tauer said. “ … This is not a career for the faint of heart. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the accolades, the odds of that stuff happening are really slim. You got to have a passion for it.”
Despite that, he had minimal concerns about Dunn’s ability to transition into coaching because of his selfless style of play. Tauer could see Dunn’s willingness and ability to fill a variety of unglamorous, yet crucial roles translated to coaching. Dunn started as a high school assistant coach and then got an internship with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, then the Indiana Pacers’ G League affiliate.
On his first day, they told Dunn to learn how to drive the team bus.
It took him six weeks to get a bus driver’s license. He picked the Mad Ants and their opponents up from the airport and took them to games or practice. When he got there, he’d get on the court. Player development, cutting video, scouting — you name it, Dunn did it.
“It’s a typical new assistant,” said Omari Johnson, a player on that Mad Ants team. “(He did) a lot of the work that the other coaches won’t or can’t do. You got to earn your stripes.”
Dunn got them. He’d move back to Minnesota to work for the WNBA’s Lynx as a video coordinator, experience that served him well for his next stop with the Rockets.
As an intern with the Pacers’ G League affiliate in Fort Wayne, Ind., one of Will Dunn’s duties was driving the team bus.
Courtesy Will Dunn
Dunn’s coaching philosophies sound, as you’d expect, like an amalgamation of Houston’s strategies across the past decade. He offered the caveat that everything he’d do would be adjusted to his personnel but emphasized winning the analytical margins of the game.
Dunn said he believed in offensive rebounding and in optimizing shot selection, focusing on threes or attempts at the rim. But he noted that with teams now trying to force more turnovers, there is value in shooting a “bad shot” in service of avoiding a giveaway.
Being a head coach gave him additional control, but the newfound authority came with challenges.
As an assistant, Dunn prefers to present Udoka options, outlining potential tradeoffs with each before offering a recommendation. But being a head coach demands he make a final decision, a challenge made even more difficult while trying to install a new offense and defense with a new roster — with some players who have never played professional basketball before — and without much practice time.
Summer League is just Summer League, but with that caveat, Dunn’s Rockets have been feisty and successful. The coach has already impressed Quadir Copeland, a guard for the Rockets’ summer team, with his willingness to fill a variety of roles in service of winning.
“He’s with us every day. He’s watching film individually with us. He’s making sure we stay on top of doing all the right things off the court with all the distractions,” Copeland said.
“ … He cares. That’s all you can ask for in a coach.”