There was one moment last season where, as Josh Giddey put it, everything “clicked”.
When the Australian and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander looked to finally be figuring it out, finding a way to co-exist as players who are both better with the ball in their hands.
“That first game after the All-Star break against Phoenix felt more natural,” Giddey said foxsports.com.auspeaking as an ambassador ahead of the NBA 2K23 video game’s release.
“I don’t know what it was, something just clicked for both of us and it felt really good out there playing with him and we both had pretty solid games.”
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It marked Gilgeous-Alexander’s return from an ankle injury after spending 10 games on the sideline, during which Giddey had taken on extra responsibility on the offensive end.
It was no coincidence either that the pair, along with Daigneault, had come together for a meeting the day before that game against the Suns.
“We watched film and went over some things and talked about how we could both impact each other when we don’t have the ball,” Giddey explained.
Daigneault said at the time that having the pair share the ball around was part of the “evolution” of both Giddey and Gilgeous-Alexander as players.
That evolution though had to wait as Giddey was sidelined after that game 124-104 loss to Phoenix with a lingering hip injury that would later end his season.
Giddey has spoken in the past about how the game’s best backcourt duos — Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, CJ McCollum and Damian Lillard — take time to find their rhythm.
Fortunately time is one thing the Thunder still have on their side, particularly given they will have to wait another season for injured second-overall pick Chet Holmgren to make his OKC debut.
Gilgeous-Alexander is also expected to miss the start of training camp with a left MCL sprain, but once he returns, all the focus will be on getting him confident and comfortable playing with Giddey.
“I think we can carry that over into the next year,” Giddey said.
“It’s going to hopefully cause a lot of problems and along with the other guys we’ve got as well, it’s a really talented young team.”
If there is one other question hanging over Giddey heading into the new season though, it is still the 19-year-old’s shooting, which very much remains a work in progress.
The Australian shot just 26.3 percent of attempts from beyond the arc in the 2021-22 season, describing it as a “swing skill” for him ahead of his sophomore campaign at OKC.
Having already proven himself a prodigious passer, it is Giddey’s shooting that will determine just how high a ceiling he will have in the NBA.
Former NBA player turned ESPN analyst JJ Redick said shooting is the “big question mark” in Giddey’s game and that improving it could be the key to “unlocking a superstar level potential”.
“There is so much to like about his game — his passing, his rebounding, his toughness, his competitiveness — but for him to reach max status, he’s got to become a better shooter,” Redick said after the Summer League.
Fortunately for Giddey, Oklahoma City made a shrewd move in the offseason to hire well-known shooting doctor Chip Engelland and the Australian is already seeing the rewards.
Not that he had to see it to believe it anyway. Engelland comes with quite the reputation.
“He’s probably the best [shooting coach] in the world,” Giddey said of Engelland, who worked with Kawhi Leonard, Tony Parker and Dejounte Murray among others during 17 seasons in San Antonio.
“Every person I talked to and asked: ‘Do you know Chip Engelland?’… I didn’t hear one bad word about him. Everything was how good he is.
“Jock Landale hit me up, they were obviously together at the Spurs, and he told me how good he is. I’ve only heard positive things about him and that’s what got me even more excited to get in the gym with him.”
Former Portland Trail Blazers assistant general manager Bill Branch used to work as a scout for the Denver Nuggets when Engelland was the team’s director of player development.
When it comes to improving your shot, it is not always about the mechanics or the things you can see. Sometimes, all you need is a little bit more confidence and, as Branch explained, that is something Engelland understood from the beginning.
“A lot of us call Chip ‘The Shot Whisperer,'” Branch said Bleacher Report in 2016.
“He’s great with shot mechanics, but his secret is building the confidence of everyone he works with. There’s nobody better at that aspect.”
Confidence is something Giddey has battled, even in the earlier stages of his development at the NBA Global Academy in Canberra, where he was constantly pushing himself to get better.
“It almost became a thing that held him back because he thought so much about it,” Marty Clarke, technical director of the Academy, told foxsports.com.au earlier in the year.
“Sometimes you get good at shooting when you don’t think about it too much.”
It is not like Giddey needs to make a major leap in his shooting anyway.
All he needs is to get to a league-average range so that opposition teams respect him enough as a shooter to open up his game even more, be it driving towards the rim or playmaking.
For Giddey, that process will start with not letting the missed hoops get to him.
“Confidence is one of the biggest things,” the 19-year-old said.
“I think that was one of the things for me last year. I missed a shot, I start overthinking things but Chip is different to any other coach I’ve ever had in the way he approaches [it].
“He’s not trying to change my whole shot or make one big difference. It’s just little things, it’s taking it day-by-day and making sure there’s always carryover from some different sessions.”
Engelland may not be the secret weapon he once was, with a reputation that carries serious weight around the league, but there is still a sense of mysticism to ‘The Shot Whisperer’.
Sure, you can quantify his impact with numbers, pointing to how Leonard went from making 50 percent from the field at San Diego State to one of the NBA’s most well-rounded shooters at San Antonio under Engelland’s watch.
But if you ask Giddey what it is in particular that makes Engelland so good so different to other shooting coaches, even the words said by the Australian himself would not tell the full story.
“He’s hard to explain,” Giddey said.
“You kind of got to be there and see what he does to understand how he works but he’s a shooting genius and that’s what gets me really excited.
“He’s a master at what he does. One of the reasons OKC hired him was because he’s so good at what he does and he’s got a very good track record of improving guys’ shots.
“That was one of the reasons why when I found out he was being hired by OKC I was so excited to work with him because I knew [he could help me].”
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