Sean Highkin
Appearances
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And, you know, Avdia, you know, the way he can kind of get downhill and, you know, pressure the rim and do stuff like that. Like they have, you know, a lot of that stuff. It's, it's one, it's an interesting thing. Dave, you're talking about like the team building thing, the way they've gone about this rebuild has been pretty interesting to me.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And you know, you can land wherever you want to land on, whether you think this is the approach you would take, or do you think this is the right approach? But when they've done these deals and,
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
whether it was the Dame trade or some of these other ones that they've done, they didn't go into them saying, we want to just get as many draft picks as possible and just have as many lottery tickets as possible, the way that Oklahoma City did or the way that Utah is, or you're starting to see Charlotte start to do that a little bit now.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
They went into it saying, we want players, and we want players that are of a certain type and of a certain skill set, of a certain age range, of a certain salary contract type, So that we can start actually building a basketball team instead of just saying, hey, we have all these future draft picks and maybe one day some of them will turn into something and maybe some of them won't.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
But that's kind of been the approach that they've taken. And you're starting to see more of their gambles on this kind of stuff have hit the knot. And that's kind of why you're starting to see them have these –
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
They still have like that is genius, but like they still have like Brogdon that they I guess Brogdon's going off or whoever. But the way I kind of have been telling it to people over the last couple of, you know, six weeks or so since they've started winning unexpectedly. And there have certainly been a lot of people here in town that are saying like, oh, well, they're messing up the tank.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
This isn't the best thing for the team.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Here's my thing. Last year, they won 21 games. Yeah. And they fell back three spots in the lottery and got the seventh pick. The year before that, they won 33 games and didn't really pull the plug on the season until like the last month of the season. And they moved up to the third pick in the lottery.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
It's a lottery. The last two years in a row, Detroit had the worst record in the league and moved back to fifth. So it's like if you're a team like Washington, yeah, like objectively and mathematically, yeah, what they're doing is probably the quote-unquote best way to build a team. But they better hit on the lottery.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
They better get Cooper Flagg or Dylan Harper or else they're just going to be doing this for – It's a loser's path.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
So just for people in the audience who maybe don't know the exact thing that you guys are referring to, at the beginning of November, they lose a game by 45 to Memphis. And afterwards, Chauncey gets up in front of us at the podium and says that what he told the team in the locker room was that if you don't –
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
is it if you slept well tonight you're a loser right so like he says that he that's not like oh sources say that he did like he said that on the record to us that he told the team and so if that's the version of it that he told us like you can imagine the version of it that he gave them yep
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I more than one, you know, I had some I was I was seriously wondering whether he was going to survive that homestand. Like if they had lost the next couple of games, I was wondering if Nate Bjorkman was going to be the interim coach by the end of that week. But they won their next three games in a row. And, you know, I think at the minimum that kind of saved, you know, his job in the season.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And then you've seen kind of the way that it's gone since then in terms of, you know, to your point, Dave, about pushing all the right buttons. You know, he took Shaden Sharp out of the starting lineup at the beginning of this run that they went on. And he was very honest about why he said Shaden's a really good scorer, but he's going to be a 25 point player.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
who gives up 25 points on the defensive end per game too. So he basically did that as a challenge to Shaden to be better on the defensive end. And, you know, it's been a little bit up and down, but Shaden largely has responded to that. And, you know, the same thing with Scoot, like early on in the season, Scoot was...
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
having a lot of the same types of issues that he had last season and there were people around the team that were wondering like did they just miss on this pick is scoot just never going to be you know a starting caliber point guard but chauncey you know stay coach him hard he stayed on him he said like you know look you know what you're doing is not good enough scoot took it to heart and scoot has been really good for the last six weeks or so and you know
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I think kind of the same vein is what we were talking about earlier with Scoot, how hard it is to learn the point guard position for the first time in the NBA. It's not easy to be a head coach for the first time in the NBA either. And Chauncey's also been kind of put in – We can go through the whole list of everything.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
We can go, we can go through the whole list of everything that's happened in the four years that he's been in the job. Like the Neil stuff happened like a month into his first season.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And then Dame has this, you know, the surgery, this first year. So they tear it down and they tank. And then the next, you know, Dame requests a trade. And then last year they have all the injuries and it's just, it's just all of this stuff. It hasn't been a really ideal situation for somebody to walk into as their first head coaching job, but. I think he's come out of it. I'll say this.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I do not think that he is going to be back next season. I still have... That's been since last April when he was going into the final guaranteed year of his contract. That's been how I felt it was going to go. I still think that's how it's going to go. But I think Chauncey has done...
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
a really good job of showing teams that you know maybe this situation in portland wasn't ideal but he made the best out of a bad situation and he's worth another look and i think he's going to wherever that may be he may get another look right he might be valuable to what they might
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I think they would like that to be the case. I'll tell you this. I think after the way the last month and a half has gone... I don't think they're going to be going into next season thinking, we need to tank, we need to get A.J. DeBonsa, or we need to get whoever the top guy in the lottery is.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I think they've kind of figured out that they have too many good players to be able to be as bad as you need to be in order to put yourself in the mix for some of those guys. So... Whether it's a coaching change is the thing that galvanizes it, or I think they have other moves they have to make as far as roster-wise. They've got to figure out the Jeremy Grant thing. They've got to consolidate.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
If the scoot leap is real, then you figure something out with Simons. They have other moves that they have to make, but I think you're more likely to see...
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Kind of whatever the next level up version, and I don't know who the player is going to be, but you look at the idea of what they did last summer with Danny Avdia, where they said, we identify this guy as somebody that we think fits with what we want to do, and we think he can help us, and we're willing to even give up what people think might be, quote unquote, too much to give up for a guy.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Whatever the next level up, whatever the fringe star version of that is. I think it's more likely that they try to go for something like that than it is that they say, well, we need to tank for another year and we need to get another high lottery pick because I just don't think that's realistic for them at this point.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
I think – I mean I'm with you. If you had told me that on March 3rd when we're recording this, they would be closer to the play-in than they were to any realistic chance at landing Cooper flag, which was absolutely their goal going into the season, was to be with the Charlottes and the Washingtons and the Utahs. Like that was their plan going in. Yeah.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
They just have too many good basketball players, I think, to be able to do that. And it's not just, you know, some of the veterans that a lot of people think they should have traded at the deadline, like the Anthony Simonses and the Jeremy Grants.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
It's a lot of their young guys that are the guys that they're building around long term, whether that's, you know, Denny Avdia, who they traded for over the summer, or Tumani Kamara, or...
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
scoot henderson who's really started to put it together the last couple of months after what was a pretty rough rookie season and first part of this season he started to really i think turn a corner in a way that i i know people in the organization think he's made some real steps and then you know the shade and sharp thing has been kind of up and down but he's been playing really well on this road trip so it's the young guys that are driving a lot of these wins
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And I think that's the thing that the organization is looking at and saying, you know, this is really encouraging that like it's not just they're winning a bunch of games because they have some veterans who are probably not going to be here long term. But yeah. And so it's messing with their lottery odds. It's not really that type of thing going on.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Yes, exactly. And also, you know, a move that they made last summer that I think a lot of people saw as pretty risky, which was that trade for Denny Obdia, which you don't really see teams that are
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
in the category of rebuilding teams right give up draft capital to bring somebody in but they looked at avdia as somebody who a you know he's on a really good contract for what you know for whatever that's worked but also somebody that they felt like positionally fits with the other young guy that they've had is young enough he's just turned 24 earlier this year and skill wise like they felt like there was still some upside there like maybe eventually there's even like some fringe all-star upside there and they brought him in and that move has worked out about as well as they could have hoped for it i think
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Him and Kamara have been their two best players this season overall, just across the board.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
This time last year, if you had asked me what the Blazers have to be excited about at all, I would have probably not really had a lot to give you because so many of their young guys were either injured, like Shaden Sharp missed a lot of last season with an injury, and then Scoot was pretty rough for a lot of last year.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
This year, you look at it, there's a lot of stuff, I think, for them to be excited and to be encouraged about.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Well, he's just kind of gotten to a point where he's a little bit more sure of what he's doing when he's out there. It doesn't feel like he's jumping, going for a layup or something and making a decision midair what he's going to do. It feels like that whole process has slowed down.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And kind of to your point about how the point guard position is hard to learn, I think he also, and I think if you gave any of the people involved in this truth serum at this point with what we've seen, I think they'd probably tell you that
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
he's been at putting kind of a disadvantage, like at a disadvantage because the Ignite was just not a good, I mean, you're seeing with a lot of the Ignite guys, like, you know, it's like Kaminga is still kind of up and down.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Right. There's like, they shut that thing down for a reason. Like you're starting to see like a lot of the Ignite guys, even the guys like Scoot and like Jalen Green and Kaminga and like some of the guys that were like top 10 picks, like, it doesn't really come around right away.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
And, you know, there was this kind of similar talk about guy, about those guys, Earl Dearon and their careers, but scoot for sure. Really? It's been, it's been like almost two months at this point that scoot has mostly been pretty good. So I think you, at this point you have to start to think he's not just having a hot streak of shooting or whatever. Like he's actually started to take some steps.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Well, at this point, they just, you know, this is year two of the post-Dame kind of rebuild. What's kind of ironic about this is the team they have right now, would have been an awesome team to put around Dame.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Like you put, you put Dame with likes Kamara, Avdia, Shaden Sharp, you know, all these guys that would have been probably the best team that Dame has had since the, you know, LaMarcus Aldridge, Batum, Robin Lopez, like, like that team. But yeah, This front office has basically just the whole way prioritized big athletic wings that can defend and play multiple positions.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
That's pretty much just the type of guys that they go for, whether it's Kamara, who they wanted in that trade with Phoenix, or Avdija, who they just gave up a bunch to get. Those are just kind of the guys that they've gone after, and they feel like... you know, you can find shooting other ways or you can find, you know, some of the other things.
The Athletic NBA Daily
Kyrie injures knee | Thunder & Shai get 50
Right. Or you can, I mean, right. You know, you look at, you know, Scoot has been a good shooter for the last couple of months and there, you know, he's been, he's been working on his shot. Then, you know, Tamani Kamara, who, you know, is known in his rookie season more as a defensive guy, wasn't really doing a whole lot on offense. He's become a pretty solid three-point shooter this year too.