With about five seconds left in the game on Friday night, the Oklahoma City Thunder trailed the Washington Wizards by 2. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope had just missed a 3-point shot and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander grabbed the rebound.
He started dribbling the ball upcourt. Right around the same moment, head coach Mark Daigneault tried to get the referee’s attention to call their final timeout and advance the ball to midcourt.
Daigneault didn’t call it in time, as Gilgeous-Alexander had started to take off. The Thunder got their timeout but were forced to inbound from a sideline on their half of the court with mere seconds remaining. Gilgeous-Alexander threw up an off-balanced, tightly contested prayer that rolled in and out, and the Wizards won 101-99.
In the aftermath of the play, Daigneault took the blame.
“Just for full clarity, in those situations I tell the players, you get a rebound, just bust it out and go, and if I want the timeout, I’ll interrupt it,” Daigneault said to media. “If anybody’s to blame on that one, that’s me.”
He expressed a similar mindset last season, and that’s also the general theme of how the team plays: With so many adequate ball handlers, players are encouraged to rebound and run, whether that’s someone 7 feet tall like Aleksej Pokusevski, 6-foot-8 like Darius Bazley or an actual, traditional guard/ball-handler.
In this case, though, that mantra ruined the chance for a scripted comeback attempt. The team will have to work on this situational communication and planning — players must be alert enough to recognize positioning on the court, time on the clock and number of timeouts in their pocket.
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