‘I know you’re in hell right now’ — What it’s like inside OKC’s Lu Dort’s impossible ‘Dorture Chamber’

IN THE SECOND half of Recreation 7 of the Houston Rockets’ first-round playoff sequence towards the Oklahoma Metropolis Thunder in 2020, NBA analyst Mark Jackson and his broadcast associate Mark Jones could not imagine what they have been watching.

All night time they’d been watching the NBA’s main scorer, James Harden, battle Luguentz Dort, who till then was an unknown Thunder rookie. And Harden was depressing. In all places he went, Dort adopted him.

With 2:55 remaining within the third quarter, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni known as a play, hoping to get Harden some air.

The plan was to set three screens for the Rockets All-Star to get some separation from the burly, relentless rookie who’d hounded Harden for the whole sequence.

First it was Danuel Home, who set a display for Harden as he ran cross-court on the elbow. Then, instantly, P.J. Tucker behind Home; then, lastly, Jeff Inexperienced.

With house, the pondering went, Harden may’ve turned the nook and pushed towards the basket for both a layup or a cross to every screener, rolling to the basket.

However Dort powered by way of all of them. Harden, exasperated, seemed on as every opening rapidly closed, then settled for one more lengthy 3-pointer that clanked off the entrance of the rim.

“They set three screens for him,” Jackson mentioned, empathizing with Harden’s plight. “But Dort was able to follow through all three of them and get back into the picture.”

It was that recreation — and this play — when Dort began to appreciate simply how large of an affect he may make on the sport.

“That was my rookie year, so I wasn’t really noticing that I’m actually that good of a defender yet,” Dort instructed ESPN. “So when they sent those three screens at me, I was like, ‘God, they trying that much just to get me off his body?'”

They have been. By the tip of the sport, Harden was exhausted and had made simply 4 of 15 pictures, together with 1-for-9 on 3-pointers, and completed with 17 factors, half his season common.

“I can see when someone is getting uncomfortable,” Dort mentioned. “They’ll start calling for screens and they want the screener to take my head off. That’s the point where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I got it. He don’t like me.'”

Dort did not say something to Harden throughout the recreation or after. He by no means talks trash except somebody says one thing to him first.

“There’s no reason for me to say anything,” Dort mentioned. “Because I already know you’re in hell right now.”

That hell would quickly have a reputation, “The Dorture Chamber,” and Dort has been inserting the NBA’s greatest begins inside it ever since.

WHEN DORT IS requested what he needs folks knew about him, he responds rapidly and plainly.

“That I’m not a villain,” he mentioned.

This time of 12 months, it is a title he will get known as lots.

“I’m always on the best players, so I am trying to make the job tough for them,” Dort mentioned. “But other than that, I’m a chill, cool guy.”

Whereas different defensive stoppers lean into the villain mentality — Dillon Brooks actually calls himself Dillon the Villain — Dort does not search such a moniker. In case your favourite participant has a nasty recreation towards Dort, or comes away from the matchup injured, like Ja Morant did within the Rockets’ first-round sequence versus the Grizzlies, Dort mentioned he does really feel badly about it.

“He’ll come into the locker room after the game, after something happens, and he’ll tell us, ‘Obviously I didn’t mean to hurt him,'” Thunder teammate Aaron Wiggins instructed ESPN.

However for Dort, that is basketball: Every matchup is a zero-sum recreation. He wins or he loses.

“He’s like a gnat just constantly poking at you,” Wiggins mentioned. “You can’t get rid of it unless you really kill it. But you can’t kill him. No. He’s going to keep chasing you.”

His job is to cease the opposite workforce’s greatest participant. If he does not do his job, he worries he will not have one anymore.

This may sound hyperbolic for a participant who signed a five-year, $87.5 million contract in 2022 and completed fourth on this season’s Defensive Participant of the Yr voting.

However Dort has seen firsthand how rapidly his basketball life can change and is not about to return to a spot the place that may occur to him once more.

Wiggins understands. They performed towards one another in highschool. Wiggins at Wesleyan Christian in North Carolina, Dort at one of many three completely different prep colleges in Florida that he attended after leaving his house in Montreal at age 16.

Again then, one of the best Canadian gamers usually went to prep colleges in the USA to extend their visibility and stage of competitors.

Dort’s teammate, newly minted MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, left his house in Toronto at 17 and went to highschool within the states.

“When I left Montreal at 16, I could barely speak English,” Dort mentioned. “I had to go to Jacksonville. It was a total culture shock. But it kind of built me as a person.”

He was away from house and every thing he’d ever identified, rising up because the son of Haitian immigrants in Montreal Nord.

“It’s a tough neighborhood, tough place to be raised,” mentioned Nelson Osse, who was Dort’s first basketball coach and guided him by way of AAU ball and highschool. “A lot of Lu’s friends ended up in gangs and stuff like that.”

As he developed, Dort’s popularity grew sufficient — he was a five-star recruit as a junior — that he was in a position to return to Canada as a senior.

He selected to play for Bobby Hurley at Arizona State. Instantly, Hurley mentioned he may inform Dort had NBA potential.

“His year with me was the first time and the only time I’ve swept Arizona,” Hurley instructed ESPN. “And when I rolled into Tucson with him, and he got off the bus, I felt like we got a real shot to compete with the athletes that Arizona generally gets.

“It gave me a distinct stage of confidence as a coach, understanding the physicality he had, and the athletic capacity, how onerous he performed. I knew we’d have an opportunity to win.”

On the time, the one knock on Dort’s recreation was an inconsistent shot. However he nonetheless averaged 16 factors per recreation as a freshman and was projected by most draft consultants to be a late-first-round or early-second-round choose.

Hurley raved about him to anybody who known as to ask about Dort’s work ethic and character. He instructed them a narrative of how nicely Dort dealt with a benching after a poor efficiency towards Colorado within the Solar Devils’ Pac-12 house opener.

“For a five-star kid to just, when I put him in the game, play as hard as he did every other game and never put his head down, it was really impressive,” Hurley mentioned. “A lot of kids would get hung up on something like that, but Lu never cared or thought about anything like that.”

So when it got here time to bless Dort’s determination to enter the NBA draft after only one season, Hurley did not hesitate.

The truth is, he went to New York Metropolis with him and his household. However as a substitute of celebrating, they waited, unexpectedly sitting within the draft’s inexperienced room inside Barclays Heart for hours.

Thirty gamers heard their names known as within the first spherical. ESPN’s draft board had Dort on its listing for greatest out there gamers for ages. The second spherical began round 9:30 p.m. and was a blur.

There have been three minutes between picks then. 5 names got here off the board. Nonetheless nothing. One other 5. Nothing. 5 extra.

Dort and his household continued their painful wait, the room turning into emptier and emptier.

His title was by no means known as.

To today, the explanations for Dort’s precipitous fall are muddled.

One former normal supervisor instructed ESPN that Dort had a poor particular person exercise in entrance of a number of groups that led to questions on his capturing and ball dealing with.

One other government speculated that groups could not resolve if he projected as a 3-and-D participant or a scoring guard.

Dort realized one thing had gone haywire. Groups have been calling his representatives to see whether or not he’d take into account enjoying abroad for a couple of years. Others have been providing nonguaranteed two-way offers.

A type of groups was the Thunder. As destiny would have it, Arizona State was positioned within the Tulsa Regional of the NCAA event that 12 months, and OKC’s government vp and normal supervisor Sam Presti had come away impressed with Dort’s physicality and willpower.

Dort left Barclays Heart in the course of the NBA draft’s second spherical.

A couple of hours later, he agreed to a two-way contract with the Thunder.

“We all cried. Not only him, I cried. His mom cried. We all prayed for him,” Osse instructed ESPN. “The expectations were so high. What we thought was going to be a party ended up like a funeral. But once Lu got that call from the Thunder, and they were going to sign him to a two-way, there was no time for him to cry anymore.

“He was going to show to the league that they made a mistake. That was his mentality. He wasn’t cursing at anybody. He wasn’t blaming anybody. It was simply, ‘You already know what? They made a mistake after which I will present them why.'”

DORT BARELY SLEPT that night. The sooner he could get out of New York and to the place that actually wanted him, the better, he thought.

So he boarded a flight to Oklahoma City the next morning and went straight to the practice facility.

Presti was waiting for him with a card — and a message.

“This is not the tip of your story,” Presti told him. “It is the start.”

Then Presti outlined a developmental plan and told him that if he followed it, the Thunder believed he could be a strong NBA player.

“I had so many feelings once I acquired right here,” Dort said. “I used to be unhappy, I used to be pissed. However I used to be additionally like, ‘Thank God they gave me this chance.'”

Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault was on that season’s staff of the Oklahoma City Blue, the Thunder’s G League team, and happened to be in the gym to put Dort through his first official workout that afternoon.

Later that evening, Dort used a ride-hailing service to get to the temporary housing the team sets up for its G Leaguers. He did not have a car or any other creature comforts that first summer.

Eventually, he convinced his friend, Greg Gilman, who’d been the student manager for the Sun Devils, to move out to OKC to help him train.

Dort would scroll by way of Instagram and see scenes and images of his buddies having enjoyable again in Tempe, or rivals from his draft class having fun with their newfound riches. When doing so acquired too miserable, particularly late at night time, he and Gilman would head again to the fitness center.

“It’s Oklahoma City in the summer,” Dort mentioned. “It’s hot. There’s bugs. It smelled like dog food.” (There is a pet food plant close to the OKC Blue coaching facility).

However Dort had a blueprint to get to the NBA, and he was going to cease at nothing to comply with it.

“It was different for both of us,” Gilman mentioned. “I’m from Phoenix, he’s from Montreal. Here we are in the middle of Oklahoma. Oh my God. But it was peaceful, and there’s not as much to do. So there’s this sense that there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own destiny. The distractions aren’t there. You can make this opportunity what you want out of it.”

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DORT WAS EVERYTHING Presti and the Thunder hoped he’d be throughout the first a part of the 2019-20 season.

His defensive capacity was unquestioned. And when the 2 guys forward of him within the pecking order, Hamado Diallo and Terrance Ferguson, acquired injured, Dort acquired the decision.

In early December, OKC was about to go on a highway journey to Portland, Utah, Sacramento and Denver. On the time, that meant matching up with Damian Lillard, Donovan Mitchell, Buddy Hield and Jamal Murray. It was an ideal take a look at.

Lillard shot 8-for-24, Mitchell went 10-25, Hield 9-24 and Murray 6-for 15 — all put in Dort’s early chamber for components of the sport.

By the point the Thunder made a pleasantly stunning playoff run because the NBA resumed play in Orlando, Florida, following a four-month hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dort had grow to be a fixture within the rotation.

It is how he ended up on then-eight-time All-Star Harden in Recreation 7 and made his life such hell that D’Antoni known as for 3 screens simply to get Dort off him, if just for a second.

“He’s kind of like artificial intelligence because once he learns something,” Gilman mentioned, “it compounds and he learns it very quickly.”

In final season’s playoffs, when the Thunder confronted the New Orleans Pelicans within the first spherical, Wiggins seen Dort had picked up on a Brandon Ingram inform, one thing Ingram favored to do to arrange certainly one of his greatest strikes.

Each time Ingram crossed the ball by way of his legs, trying to drive, Dort recognized it virtually instantly.

“He’ll cut off a specific move that he recognizes,” Wiggins mentioned. “So now [Ingram] has to find something else.”

Ingram shot simply 35% % within the sequence and averaged simply 14 factors, as Oklahoma Metropolis swept New Orleans.

THAT RELENTLESSNESS HAS translated to the offense, too.

Dort is not a naturally gifted shooter, however now he makes greater than sufficient of his pictures to maintain defenses trustworthy. After capturing 29.7% from 3 throughout his rookie season, he remodeled 41% this season on greater than 5 makes an attempt per recreation.

“I watched a lot of film to see how teams were guarding me,” Dort mentioned. “And I realized that if I played [offense] the way I play defense, and I’m able to knock down some big 3s for my teammates, we’re going to be hard to stop as a team.”

And little will get the Oklahoma Metropolis crowd going like a flurry of Dort’s moon ball 3-pointers splashing by way of the web.

That is how the Thunder gained Recreation 5 of their second-round sequence towards the Nuggets earlier this month. Dort shot simply 1-for-4 from 3 within the first three quarters, then, in a span of two:01 of recreation time, hit three in a row.

“That just speaks to the worker and the person he is to step into those shots with confidence,” Gilgeous-Alexander mentioned. “Obviously they were guarding us a certain way. Those shots were there, but they weren’t falling. So his braveness to shoot them and confidence to take them was huge, but nothing out of the ordinary. That’s who Lu is.”

Nonetheless, Dort’s calling card stays.

On Thursday, he earned his first All-Defensive Group nod after rating among the many NBA’s greatest in numerous defensive classes, together with within the high 10 in defensive halfcourt matchups towards 2025 All-Stars this season, per GeniusIQ monitoring.

For six years now, he has been assigned to path opponents’ most harmful gamers — irrespective of if it is a guard comparable to Harden or an influence ahead comparable to Minnesota’s Julius Randle.

Randle dominated the primary half of Recreation 1 in these Western Convention finals, scoring 20 on eight pictures. However then the Dorture started.

It was virtually onerous to observe Dort physique Randle 4 straight instances with 7:02 remaining, just for Dort to tug the chair on him because the 250-pound ahead tried to again him down.

Randle crashed to the ground, untouched. Dort stole the ball from him and fired a cross to Alex Caruso to ignite a Thunder quick break.

Randle may solely look on as Gilgeous-Alexander raced previous Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards for a layup to extend the result in 13.

OKC gained by 26.

“He’s always playing against everybody’s favorite player,” Gilman mentioned. “The other team’s ‘hero.’ So what’s the yin and yang of that? He’s the villain. He’s Lu the Beast. The Dorture Chamber. But if you know him as a person, you know it’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“He is a grizzly bear on the court docket and a teddy bear off the court docket.”