The Athletic: As Thunder eye NBA title, one thing is clear: ‘Nobody’s bigger than the program’

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INDIANAPOLIS — Oklahoma City head coach Mark Daigneault declared, “We have a flat locker room,” in a video call a week before the NBA Finals started, and he didn’t mean it was flat like day-old Schweppes.

No, he meant that there was no hierarchy, no levels. The floor was open, and anyone could speak up — whether it was the NBA MVP or somebody who had played 20 total seconds of non-garbage-time minutes in the NBA Finals.

And so it was, as the clock wound down in the most crucial game of the Thunder’s season, with the Indiana Pacers making multiple runs to build a 10-point, second-half lead in Game 4 of the finals, that the voice speaking up in the huddles was none other than Jaylin Williams.

Yes … Jaylin Williams, the reserve center from Arkansas, not Jalen Williams, the All-Star lottery pick.

“The communication on the bench was outstanding,” Daigneault said. “Most of the guys that weren’t playing, I thought, were great. … J-Will had an unbelievable voice tonight in a lot of those huddles.”

(For those of you who don’t speak Thunder-ese, “J-Will” is their shorthand for Jaylin Wliiams, while “J-Dub” is their name for Jalen Williams.)

But it’s not just that a lightly used, third-year pro spoke up as the Thunder rallied for what may eventually go down as the most important win in franchise history. It’s proof of concept for a team and a locker room where the best player leads from the middle, so to speak, as just another one of the guys, while the franchise has worked to add the right mix of other voices to the group. Included in that was using a 2022 second-round pick on a 6-foot-8 center light on dunk highlights but big on basketball IQ and personality.

Yes, the Thunder are wildly talented, and that’s the biggest reason they won 68 regular-season games and are nearing an NBA championship. But it’s not the only reason; the other piece of this puzzle that fans don’t see as easily is how connected and together this group of players is, from top to bottom.

Those soft values of “chemistry” and “culture” are easy to extol in news conferences but difficult to incubate in practice, no matter how hard a front office or coaching staff tries. It’s the unpredictable concoction of players and personalities that leads the best locker rooms to be a wind at their respective team’s backs, and the worst ones to be a spike strip on their road to success.

Oklahoma City has built a gleaming example of the former. Walk into the Thunder locker room after almost any game, especially away from Paycom Center, and it’s impossible to miss. It’s unfakeable: These guys enjoy one another, and they’re having fun.

Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams will be calmly conversing in one corner, lockers next to each other, having just combined to drop 60 on some poor opponent, and yet chatting like they’re in line at Publix. (It’s the same after their rare losses, by the way, as my colleague Anthony Slater noted.)

The other Jaylin Williams will be in a boisterous section with Lu Dort and the other younger Thunder players but also often parrying back and forth with his namesake and Gilgeous-Alexander. Vets Isaiah Hartenstein, Kenrich Williams and Alex Caruso join in from their corners. Locker geography keeps them in certain areas, but it’s more of a loose 15-man mesh than a group of small cliques, and the trash talk bounces easily around the room.

The most obvious expression of that chemistry, for those who watched the team throughout the season, is how the players group up around whatever player is conducting a walk-off interview and finish it with a round of barking. Nobody ever leaves the court alone.

Beyond that, they mercilessly bust each other’s chops — with a wink. You can see it when Gilgeous-Alexander sits next to Jalen Williams at the podium and praises him for defending bigs “at 6-4”, (Williams is 6-6) … or when Jalen Williams lauds veteran Caruso’s effort in Game 4 and adds “it’s hard for him because he’s like 100” … or when the team spends a postgame interview session conducting various clothing experiments on unflappable sideline reporter Nick Gallo.

Not even the coach is immune. As he held the microphone following the Thunder’s win over the Minnesota Timberwolves to clinch the Western Conference title, Daigneault interrupted praise of his players to jokingly interject, “but they’re idiots,” because they were stacking towels on his head while he talked.

Underneath that goofiness is a seriousness, though, that comes out in those huddles. It’s notable that the Thunder were able to put together so many talented young players who have meshed so well, but it’s also a testament to the choices they made about the vets who surround them, notably Caruso and Kenrich Williams, the only two players on the roster older than 30.

“It gets a little overplayed, to be honest with you, that you need all these veteran guys,” Daigneault said. “I think you need the right ones. That’s the biggest thing. It’s not about hitting a certain quota of older players when you have a younger team; it’s, ‘Do you have the right one?’ (Kenrich Williams) is the right one.”

Daigneault didn’t say that after Game 4 — he said it three and a half years ago, while the team was 14-31.

Kenrich Williams rises for an easy two points against the Pacers during the NBA Finals. (Kyle Terada/Imagn Images)

A contractually required throw-in to the Steven Adams trade with New Orleans, the Thunder liked Williams enough that they gave him a four-year, $27 million extension in 2022 even though he’d played a limited role on what was then a bad team.

“They have a winning mindset outside of basketball, I’ll put it like that,” Kenrich Williams said. “When we have a tough loss, or performance-wise, somebody doesn’t play well, when you walk in the building, practice or arena, everybody is very positive. Other places … there are times where you can just feel the weight.

“And that starts with the front office bringing in great workers, great staff, whether that’s the medical and training staff, the weight room guys, the chefs. There’s all positive energy when you walk in the building. So I think that’s the No. 1 thing, just being with a different team and being able to see like, OK, man, this is different.”

Five years after arriving, “Kenny Hustle” is now one of the chief guardians of that culture, a Thunder-y version of what Udonis Haslem was to Miami. (Important note: The 30-year-old is not yet ready to be called an “OG.” For now, he is merely an “unc.”)

After a misstep in the 2024 Gordon Hayward trade, the Thunder doubled down on those values when they brought in Caruso — somebody Daigneault knew well from their time in the G League together in 2016-17 — and Hartenstein.

Yes, they were both really good, but they also fit in with the room. Caruso, at 31, the oldest player on what is still a very young team, has picked his spots to speak up rather than dominate the room. Rookies Ajay Mitchell and Nikola Topić also noted him as their go-to veteran as they learn the league.

“I’ve said this about (Hartenstein) and Caruso many times this year, but it’s felt like they’ve been on the team for three years,” Daigneault said during the first-round series against the Memphis Grizzlies. “They’re such easy fits because they’re so team-oriented. They’re one of the guys, they want to be one of the guys. They have a great balance of veteran and experienced presence.

“And we use their voice in that way, but not in an overwhelming way. That can sometimes happen where somebody comes in and they have the floor, you know, and everyone else has to listen and take notes. They’re not like that at all. They blend right into the team. They have a great balance of assertiveness with their game and their personality and respect for the rest of the guys and where the rest of the guys are in their careers. Their emotional intelligence, those two guys, has been out of this world.”

Of course, a lot of this all gets back to Gilgeous-Alexander.

“He’s a really unselfish superstar,” Hartenstein said. “He’s always team first.”

“I think I started noticing in the beginning of the season, where I caught in the pocket and made an extra pass [costing Gilgeous-Alexander an assist], and I was like, ‘Sorry I’ll go score next time,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s good, just make the best basketball play.’ So he’s not going into the game thinking about stats.”

All of this takes us back to Jaylin Williams, and how and why he was able to speak up in the moment in Game 4. As I talked to him in the Thunder locker room about his role after the win, Wiggins and Dort, in lockers on either side of him, started yelling, “Teammate of the Year!”

“Being able to watch it from the side, I get a different view,” Jaylin Williams said. “Trying to kind of echo what we need to do, echo the plan. Sometimes it’s different hearing it from a player that’s going through battle with you than hearing it from a coach, so I’m trying to talk to the guys.

“We’ve always had this saying where if you feel like there’s something that you want to say to a teammate, like, nobody’s bigger than the program. So, you just say it to each other.”

“He has a great ability to lead,” Caruso said. “As a young player, to have that ability to be vocal and be confident in yourself and confident enough that the guys are going to listen to you, it’s a great skill, and it’s something that he’s been working on.”

It may not have been as sensational as scoring 15 points in the last five minutes of an NBA Finals game. But in its own way, it was just as impressive, and it’s another small part of why the Thunder are two wins from a title.

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