Thunder Practice Report | Nov. 18, 2021

Transcript

00:00The Thunder are heading on the road to face Milwaukee tomorrow and then Boston in a few days,

00:04but one person on the coaching staff that will not be joining them is none other than head coach

00:09Mark Dagnalt. He said that his wife will be expecting a baby very soon and this is something

00:14that he has been talking with Sam Presti, the players, and the whole coaching staff about for

00:19the past few weeks and that everyone has been prepared. But Shea Gildas-Alexander did have a

00:25comment about that during practice today. Coach Dagnalt had a few things to say about each

00:38rookie's performance last night. He started with Jeremiah Robinson-Earl. He says that he's doing a

00:44better job of being bigger in those spaces, being bigger as a defender, and getting into the right

00:48spots during the offense. Trey Mann was looking very nice last night, hitting shots, making a good

00:55defensive game. Coach Dagnalt even commented about how he felt he handled Buddy Heald in the game

00:59against Sacramento, although he went down with a right ankle sprain and says that they're continuing

01:04to evaluate him and continuing to look at this ankle. But as of right now, he is just day-to-day

01:09and says that in the future he will probably be making a short run with the Oklahoma City Blue

01:14once again, but did not give us a time frame on when that will happen. Moving forward though,

01:19obviously everyone's been talking about how amazing Lou Dort played last night, ending the

01:23game with 34 points, finishing 14 of 22 shooting. And Shea Gildas-Alexander said he was just feeding

01:30the hot hand. That is something that is very impressive and something that we hadn't seen

01:53from Lou Dort quite before, and he has had five consecutive games where he scored 20 points

01:58or more. And someone asked if we believe that this could be Lou Dort's ceiling, but Coach Dagnalt

02:04reiterated that he does not believe in putting a ceiling on any of his players and thinks that

02:08Lou Dort is capable of much more as long as he puts in the work. We'll see how much work the

02:13Thunder continues to put in in developing this team, and we'll see what more they can do against

02:18the Milwaukee Bucks tomorrow. Reporting for SI Thunder, I'm Christine Butterfield.