Why Thunder opened training camp at its old practice facility
The Clippers, Nets and Nuggets tipped-off training camp in beautiful San Diego on Tuesday. The Jazz traveled to a Las Vegas resort for the start of camp.
The Thunder also took a training camp trip, albeit a shorter and less glamorous one.
Rather than opening camp as usual at its swanky practice facility near Broadway Extension and Britton Road, the Thunder is spending the week five miles north at its former facility off North Lincoln Blvd. near West 33rd Street, where, if the wind is blowing, the smell of dog food wafts from the nearby Nestle Purina Plant.
The corrugated-metal building, which now belongs to the G League OKC Blue, was a roller skating rink before the Thunder came to town in 2008 and converted it.
Up until moving to a fresh facility in 2011, it’s where young Thunder stars like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden practiced. Nick Collison, who knows the place all too well, watched from the sidelines Tuesday as a new Thunder team practiced together for the first time.
“There’s a certain air in this building,” Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said on the first day of training camp.
That’s what general manager Sam Presti and coach Mark Daigneault hoped the team would feel. The Edmond gym was a launchpad for the Thunder’s first wave of success. More than a decade later, the Thunder sees it as a symbolic place to start over.
“We have a blank canvas,” Daigneault said after practice. “Everything is unwritten. We have an unbelievable responsibility and opportunity with that.
“But in order to do that well, I think it’s important to understand your history and past before you really plow into the future and tackle the present. And this is a place where we really try to tap into our principles as an organization and really like to understand what the teams before us were built on.”
The idea came about in the offseason, when Presti and Daigneault traveled together during the pre-draft process.
Presti likes the nostalgia of the old building, and Daigneault worked out of the space for five seasons as head coach of the Blue.
Still, they didn’t know how receptive the players would be of hosting camp there, but that worry was put to rest when Daigneault had breakfast with Darius Bazley in Los Angeles. It was right around the time when GilgeousAlexander, who was also in Los Angeles, signed his max extension.
Bazley had been working out at the Blue facility, and he told Daigneault how much he liked the gym.
Bazley even suggested having training camp there. The third-year forward didn’t know a plan was already in the works.
“When Bazley said that, we were like, ‘OK, our idea is gonna work,’” Daigneault said. “This is a team that it’s gonna resonate with. Because that’s always the risk with something like this.”
As Daigneault said, “You can’t do this with every team in the NBA.”
The Thunder had a meeting Monday, and Gilgeous-Alexander said the team was told why training camp would be moved.
“Basically Oklahoma City is a hardworking city, hard-working program and we build things from the ground up,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, relaying the message. “This is where it all started, so it’s cool to start our season back here.”
Not even Gilgeous-Alexander, the face of the franchise, is familiar with the building. He’s only stepped inside it a few times, most memorably for the Blue and White scrimmage in the fall of 2019.
“Obviously a lot started and happened in this facility,” he said.
The Thunder is making it work, but things are a bit cramped. It’s a much smaller facility than the current practice gym. Thunder staffers are sharing office spaces, and the players have less privacy. The weight room and kitchen — both of which are hidden at the regular facility — are in plain sight at the Blue gym.
Daigneault spoke through the clanking of weights after practice Tuesday. He pointed to the weight room floor, which looked like a rubber mat.
“It’s not like a regular floor where the sweat just lands on the floor,” Daigneault said. “It seeps into the floor. It’s like soil.”
Daigneault used to tell his Blue players that they were sweating into the same floor as “a lot of really hard-working people.”
“I just think there’s something about the building,” Daigneault said. “It’s got great soul.
“That was the first thing I learned when I came here, and I want it to be the first thing that they learn as we start to embark on a challenging, but rewarding and fulfilling journey of becoming the team that we’re gonna become.”