Oklahoma City Thunder forward Lu Dort churned boredom into productivity.
Secluded and unoccupied, locked inside his Montreal home during the early days of the COVID-19 quarantine, the at-the-time rookie powered on his iPad, calling up video of the NBA’s top players.
Dort had burst into the Thunder’s rotation midway into his first professional season despite his undrafted status and two-way contract.
Advertisement
His success stemmed from defense, the side of the ball he began to take pride in as a Canadian high schooler when he faced elite prospects south of the border and hoped to show off by shutting them down. But the NBA has resources basketball did not when he was a teenager. So as he reviewed video, he opened his notes application and began to type observations about what he saw.
By this point, OKC was already using Dort to pester some of the NBA’s greats. His modest breakout came during a December 2019 road trip when he guarded Damian Lillard in Portland, Donovan Mitchell in Utah and Jamal Murray in Denver. Dort is a linebacker masquerading as a basketball player, a 6-foot-3, broad-shouldered barricade to the paint, the personification of the switchable, try-hard defense the Thunder flash today. As a rookie, he sought to learn more.
He began his studies with two LA Clippers, Paul George and Kawhi Leonard, marking where they liked their shots and in which directions they preferred to drive. The inspiration came from Thunder assistant coach David Akinyooye, who would quiz Dort on defensive minutiae, such as the tendencies of the NBA’s upper class.
Four years later, Dort has not stopped learning.
The notes on his iPad, which remain top secret, have only become more robust: More players, more details — and now, they go beyond just the information he could glean from videos.
After games, he heads straight to the iPad to update his scouting reports. In 2024, they include personal findings, such as little moves that annoyed whichever player he just spent 48 minutes bothering.
“(The first thing I write) is what I can do to frustrate a player or whatever. Two is if a guy is comfortable when I go under a screen or when I go over. I try to mix it up,” Dort said in a recent conversation with The Athletic. “If it’s a guy I should pick up full court and put a lot of pressure on, I’ll … play in the frontcourt. If it’s a fast guard, I back up a little bit.
Advertisement
“Sometimes, players improve. An example is (Sacramento Kings guard) De’Aaron Fox. He got better at 3-point shooting, so my scout on him is different. But it’s just a little something that if I notice, I’ll go back and change it.”
With the 2023-24 season winding down, Dort, 24, has developed into one of the sport’s stingiest stoppers. He’s done it as a member of the league’s surprise team, the up-and-coming Thunder (52-24), which have a chance to finish atop the Western Conference.
His offensive performance has transformed in the process. He’s “cut the fat,” as his head coach Mark Daigneault describes it, eliminating many of his contested or pull-up 3-pointers and instead concentrating on balanced, stand-still jumpers. His efficiency and 3-point percentage have skyrocketed.
All the while, the list of players in Dort’s notes has only grown more diverse. The Thunder defense, which ranks fourth in points allowed per possession, starts with him.
Oklahoma City will stick Dort on any type of scorer. Big, small, young, old, tall, wide, in a house, with a mouse — it doesn’t matter. If there’s a player the Thunder want to badger, Dort is on him.
He started a recent game against the New Orleans Pelicans on crafty guard CJ McCollum. Come crunchtime — when the Pels offense centered around Zion Williamson, one of the few players wider than Dort — Oklahoma City moved him over to the brawny All-Star forward.
This past weekend, Dort began an eventual blowout of the Phoenix Suns manning the lanky Kevin Durant. But Durant was looking to facilitate, not necessarily score. Daigneault noticed his intentions and switched Dort onto conventional guard Devin Booker, another All-Star.
“We can shift him anywhere,” Daigneault told The Athletic. “He can guard any player. There’s no one he can’t guard.”
Advertisement
Dort has spent 46 percent of his minutes this season guarding the opposing lineup’s highest-usage player, according to Second Spectrum. That’s the highest rate in the NBA. In other words, no one spends more time than Dort does guarding the head of the snake.
He is even shutting down his teammates.
When MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is working on a new aspect of his game, he makes sure to experiment with it against Dort before using it in moments that matter.
“I always try to test myself against him,” Gilgeous-Alexander told The Athletic. “Because he’s the best of the best.”
A couple of summers ago, the 30-point scorer wanted to improve his post-up game, so he made sure Dort, a teammate of his not just with the Thunder but also with the Canadian national team, was defending him throughout scrimmages. Each time down the court, Gilgeous-Alexander attempted to back down a cinder block.
“I might’ve offensive-fouled him a little bit,” Gilgeous-Alexander said with a smile.
The logic is simple: If a move works against Dort, even if it takes a well-placed elbow to pull it off, then Gilgeous-Alexander is ready to unleash it on the world. Of course, Dort takes defensive swings others could not even imagine.
Inside a league of versatile defenders, Dort’s style is unique.
He can recover on attackers like few defenders can, as Houston Rockets forward Dillon Brooks experienced last week. He obsesses over his hand placement. When he mans a driver heading to the defender’s left, he will stretch out his left arm so it’s almost angled behind his back, still far enough extended to deter a lane to the hoop but also far enough away from a shot that he is less likely to reach in for a ticky-tack foul.
At other times, he looks as if he is trying to impersonate a tyrannosaurus rex, bending his elbows and holding his hands out in front.
The quirks are abundant.
Every once in a while, instead of closing out on an expert foul-drawer conventionally, with a hand up as the shooter releases the jumper, Dort will jolt his palm downward, almost clawing at the basketball. In other moments, he’ll swipe his hand in front of a shooter’s face, as if he’s fast-forwarding through a grand wave goodbye, not even trying to hit the ball.
Advertisement
“I’ve never seen that in my life,” Daigneault said. “We’re teaching contesting, and he just kinda does it and you just kinda let him do it.”
And that’s because it works. Dort isn’t trying these moves randomly.
He discovered the big goodbye his rookie season while facing the Rockets in the playoffs. His assignment during that series was former MVP James Harden, the generation’s premier hack hawker.
The move almost tempts a foul hunter into breaking his rhythm. Dort swipes a hand into the cookie jar but removes it just in time for the shooter to rise. Every once in a while, it won’t look pretty, such as when he inadvertently smacked McCollum during the Pelicans game. But more often than not, it goes smoothly.
“In my head, I was like, let me just try that, mess them up with the closeout, mess up with my shot contest, mess up whenever they dribble the ball,” Dort said. “I think I don’t really wanna hit the ball. I just wanna mess them up, just because I’m trying to do something that they never saw before.”
Technical jargon aside, Dort just wants to weird them out. And his oddities span from closeouts to pick-and-rolls.
“I don’t think he’s an exciting guy to screen,” Daigneault said. “You’re gonna get hit. And it’s gonna hurt you more than him.”
Normally someone built like Brian Urlacher is easier to impede, if only because he’s a larger target. But not in this case.
Dort will stampede defenders. If he sees daylight, he’ll slither by them. As usual, he does it in his way.
Basketball 101 says that a defender should not go “under” a screen (which is when a defender guarding the dribbler in a pick-and-roll avoids the screener by running around him on the side closer to the basket) against a splashy shooter. But Dort memorized the style guide just so he could break it.
At times, he will head under a screen against a top-notch shooter just to confuse the other team. It doesn’t matter if the dribbler is someone as dangerous pulling up as Lillard, Dort is confident that he can close back out on him. And he understands how improvising can aggravate the screener, even if he’s not running Oklahoma City’s preferred coverage — although there’s an argument to be made that if Dort is doing it, no matter the type of coverage, it’s what OKC wants.
Advertisement
“I look at him more like he’s an artist,” Daigneault said. “You gotta let him go.”
Now that defenders expect his otherwise unexpected unders, Dort is riffing on his eccentricities. Look at this deke from a mid-March game against the Dallas Mavericks. Dort is guarding Kyrie Irving, acts like he’s about to go under the screen on a far-out pick-and-roll, then jumps back up to go over it and high steps with Irving until he knocks the ball out of bounds.
Entering Wednesday night’s game against the Boston Celtics, Dort had guarded ballhandlers on nearly 1,200 pick-and-rolls this season, the third-most in the NBA. He’s fought over the screen on 52 percent of those pick-and-rolls, switched on 21 percent of them, gone under on 12 percent and run other coverages on 14 percent. The intention is to execute the game plan. But NBA stars are too smart to approach the same way repeatedly. Eventually, they figure it out … unless Dort is there for The Second City improv.
It’s as if he’s sprouted an antennae, the sole purpose of which is to detect when big men are too comfortable. He will guard pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll, attacking with the same coverage, traversing over the screen time and time again. The screener may spot the trend and start rolling to the basket early. That’s when Dort goes under the pick and runs into a moving opponent.
“Sometimes (the screener) doesn’t even know what I’m doing and he’s just guessing,” Dort said.
All of a sudden, what seemed like a fundamental pick-and-roll turns into an offensive foul, Dort’s specialty. He has drawn 145 offensive fouls over the past two seasons, the most in the NBA.
Dort will tell you that his physicality defending the ball is the most important step. But he has moves beyond that, and he can list them off like he’s reciting a scouting report on himself.
Advertisement
“Sometimes, I act like I’m running fast toward the screen but I don’t and the screener gets physical, which becomes an illegal screen,” he said. “So there’s a bunch of stuff. Sometimes, I just run into the screen and get the screener mad and next time he comes he’ll put more power into it, which becomes illegal.
“So there’s so many tricks that I can say, but the main thing is I move my feet well. It’s like, I’m gonna bait the guy, go over or under. Sometimes, I mess up the guy with the ball, as well, so it’s a couple of tricks that I add together.”
There’s at least one man who noticed Dort’s attention to detail and predicted his comeuppance.
Dort did not want his studiousness to drop off after he arrived at the NBA bubble during his rookie season. So he began to watch game video with veteran Chris Paul, a Thunder player who would not stop talking about defense throughout the early part of the season.
“Playing hard is a talent,” Paul told The Athletic. “And you can’t tell me a person night in, night out who’s playing as hard as Lu is.”
Paul had taken a liking to Dort since long before the NBA bubble. When Dort was on a two-way contract and thus was limited in how much time he could spend on the NBA roster, Paul began to track Dort’s days of eligibility on his own. The defense, even in Dort’s early days, was that apparent.
Since leaving Oklahoma City after that season, the future Hall of Famer has followed Dort’s career. When the Thunder converted Dort’s contract from a two-way to a team-friendly, partially guaranteed deal, still an upgrade from his previous financial situation, Paul was there to celebrate. When Dort signed a five-year, $82.5 million contract to return to OKC in 2022, Paul FaceTimed him.
“Oh my God, I went nuts. … I said, ‘Hey, let me hold some of it,’ ” Paul remembered. “I’m seriously getting goose bumps thinking about it now because he is one of the most genuine, hardworking people I ever met in my life.”
Advertisement
Heading into that summer’s playoff series against the Rockets, Dort and Paul outlined Harden’s idiosyncrasies together.
Paul explained how Harden used dribble moves to “make guys fall asleep.” He warned Dort not to follow the ball too much and maneuvered ways that he could try to poke at it. Dort ended up busting out the clawing closeout for the first time in that series.
Now, that’s one of his regular moves, even if there is nothing regular about it. Of course, Dort is hardly conventional.
“The cumulative effect of studying the main guys, playing against them, learning the hard lessons, studying them again — he’s just repeated that and his effort hasn’t waned,” Daigneault said. “So he’s still got the relentlessness and now he’s got the craft and the rhythm.”
(Photo of Lu Dort: Joshua Gateley / Getty Images)
