Dom Amore: As Jim Calhoun was sweating it out, one of his guys brought home an NBA title

HARTFORD, Conn. — Jim Calhoun’s phone went off just after noon on Monday. One of his guys was at the other end, one of his guys who less than 12 hours earlier became champion of the basketball world.

“I’m only calling the people who made a difference,” Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault told Calhoun. “And if I hadn’t gone to UConn, if you hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here.”

And Calhoun, 83, relating the call to The Hartford Courant and said, “I haven’t teared up many times in my life, but I teared up then.”

On Sunday night, it was Calhoun’s palms that were watering. Even if he has coached his last basketball game, won his last championship on the court, he was coaching vicariously through Daigneault, who was UConn’s student manager from 2004-07.

Daigneault, who wrote the afterward for Calhoun’s upcoming book, "More Than A Game," was doing menial tasks, but taking uncredited master’s classes in the craft of coaching. These last several weeks, he navigated the Thunder through four playoff series, two of them, including The Finals against Indiana, going the full seven games. After going 22-50 and 24-58 his first two seasons, he helped assemble and coached the Thunder up and over all of the league’s perennial title contenders to win the franchise’s first NBA crown since 1979, when it played in Seattle as the SuperSonics.

And Calhoun watched every game, texted, talked with Daigneault a half dozen times as it was all unfolding. As the Thunder completed the ride with a 103-91 victory Sunday, Calhoun was watching from his summer home on the Rhode Island shore.

“Sunday night? My palms were soaking wet,” Calhoun said. “I didn’t want anything to be taken away from Mark. They were a team that keeps its composure, knows who they are. These are the things I identify when I see a coach. I’m not overly crazy about worrying too much about plays. I want players. I do think his team reflects his personality, and that’s one of the great, great tributes I’d give him.”

Monday morning, Calhoun reached out, reminding Daigneault what he said the day he asked him to drive his car to New York in 2004. “We started this thing off with me saying, ‘don’t (bleep) up,'” Calhoun said. “Guess what? You didn’t. How incredibly proud I am of you, and how happy I am for you.”

The Thunder, the No. 1 seed at the start of the playoffs, swept Memphis, beat Denver in seven, beat Minnesota in five. They lost Game 1 at home to the Pacers, but rebounded to take a 3-2 lead, then were blown out in Indianapolis in Game 6 to force the winner-take-all game at Oklahoma City.

“I thought Game 6 was more important,” Calhoun said. “I know Mark, I was watching Mark. He wasn’t giving up, he wasn’t changing things, he was taking it and he was going to use it in some sort of way. Not screaming, just saying, ‘let’s look at it. We can’t turn the ball over 21 times.’ He said, ‘OK, we played in their building, now we’re going back to our building where we don’t get beat. We’re tired, they’re tired, but we’re better.’ He showed with me, on the phone, the same kind of confidence.”

Daigneault, from Leominster, Mass., joined UConn’s program as a freshman, leaving his playing days behind in high school. He gradually took on bigger and bigger responsibilities, working with associate head coach George Blaney, soaking up all he could.

“Four years, a manager,” Calhoun said. “The things he had to do, and learning the whole time. He truly gets it, the building of a culture.”

Calhoun and Blaney pushed him to launch a coaching career at Holy Cross, and move up the ladder, to Florida, to Oklahoma City’s G-League affiliate, to becoming a head coach in the NBA where he built and guided the team around superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the league and Finals MVP.

“One thing I learned is, it’s hard to get to your ceiling as a team in the playoffs,” Daigneault told reporters Sunday night, “when you’re playing great teams over and over again. It’s really about how high your floor is. I thought that was the mark of our team. You have to really grind it out. It’s an endurance race. You have to be able to win in the mud. You have to be able to win ugly, have to be able to gut it out. That’s what we did. The team did an unbelievable job of that. … I’ve called the guys uncommon many times, but I really believe that. Just the way they operate, the way they behave, the way they compete is uncommon in professional sports. It just is.”

The NBA is widely considered a “player’s league.” Coaches are not the stars, but gain credibility with their preparedness, work habits, humility. Championship coaches become household names, with salaries to match.

“The guy’s won a world championship,” Calhoun said. “Think about all the great coaches who never won one.”

Ray Allen, Rip Hamilton, Caron Butler, Travis Knight and Scott Burrell are former UConn players who played on NBA championship teams. Daigneault joins that elite group, and starts a club of his own — a UConn student manager who has been NBA Coach of the Year and led a championship team. There isn’t a jersey to retire, but could he join the players in the Huskies of Honor?

“To achieve that, the best basketball team in the world right now, we honor Olympians, why not honor a world champion?” Calhoun said. “He’s got to be honored in some way. You can’t let a guy win a world championship and not do something. It’s just such a great story.”

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