Mark Daigneault on Thunder bouncing back with win over Nets

Mark Daigneault postgame comments after Thunder win over Brooklyn

Cason Wallace during 4th quarter

Great intensity, big time, and started with it in the first half, I thought he and Alex, when they went in the game, those guys really competed on the perimeter. And they remained in rhythm at that time because of the start they got off to and the confidence they had. But I thought those guys set a good tone when they went in there in the first half and then obviously set a great tone in the fourth quarter with the stops.

Game flow for the Thunder

Yeah, definitely good 48-minute endurance tonight. I thought our disposition early in the game, you know, didn't match theirs.

They obviously made shots as well, but I think some of that has to do with confidence and some of that has to do with the force they were playing with. And I thought, at least from our perspective, it was no coincidence that some of their shots didn't go down later when our disposition was a little bit more forceful and we became the aggressor in the game. So I definitely think we got better on defense as the game went on. But it's a good lesson for us because, They were really, really hard to slow down once they got going. And they got going early because they were the more ready team at the beginning of the game.

Aaron Wiggins playing well

Yeah, I mean, I think the offensive aggressiveness, he's playing with a lot of confidence right now on offense. And with the way we get played, you need secondary guys. You need guys that are going to shoot it with confidence, drive it with confidence, be secondary playmakers. And he's really carved a nice niche with that role and continued it tonight. thought offensively in the first half, he really stabilized us in a part of the game where we could not get stops. And so,

If you're down 25 because you can't score either, that's a lot to overcome. And so he steadied us, but he's had an unbelievable run here for a good period of time. The double teaming that you saw tonight, that's not new.

Being a good team and facing different looks

We've proven that to this point in the season. Teams are going to go to different solutions on both ends of the floor. so they're going to go to new things on offense that we have to defend and we have to understand. And then they're going to do different things on defense. And one of them is zone. One of them is the double teams at half court, like we saw against Minnesota. And again, tonight, blitzing. We're going to see the gauntlet of stuff. The fortunate thing for us is we're seeing it now.

And so we're able to flex that muscle. You can only work on it so much in practice. so, you know, again, tonight, you know, it wasn't really, we've had like three straight games, actually since All-Star break, we have not seen a base defense. Seriously, Utah played 48 minutes zone, Minnesota played 48 minutes of changing defenses and then the squeezing and then tonight was pretty much the same. And so that's good for us. You know, it helps us get better and flex our muscle. You know, we haven't been perfect against it, but the only way to get better is to work through it.

Figuring out lineups heading down stretch

Part of my job is to get our best players on the court. And as I've said many times, we're in the early stages of understanding that.

It would be, has it been perfect? No. Maybe some of the personnel that we're facing has challenged it, but I think that's good for us. It's good for us in terms of working on it. It's good for us in terms of understanding it. And, you know, if we can sustain the regular season right here and make the playoffs, you know, it would be irresponsible of us to not know everything there is to know about every part of our team. And that's a part of our team that we don't know a lot about and that we have to get better at.

And through these 24, 25, 26 games, however many there are left, we need to work on it. We need to understand it. And then by the end of the season, we'll have taken the team as far as we can. We'll know everything that there is to know. We'll have worked on everything there is to work on with the 82 games we have. And that's our mindset. And that's going to be our mindset down the stretch of the season here, not only with the double big, with everything.