Canada's Lu Dort carved out NBA career through the art of adaptability 

The best basketball players in the world are static, like the sun. They do what they have always done to succeed while their teammates revolve around them like planets, figuring out how to fit in. Luka Doncic has had the ball in his hands since he won Euroleague MVP at 19 years old, for example. His role doesn’t change. 

But for the vast majority of players — the ones who walk the fine line between being in the league and out of it, between starting games and finishing them — configuring your game to meet the team's needs on a year-to-year basis is key to sustaining success. And few players know how to do that better than Luguentz Dort. 

The 25-year-old Haitian-Canadian from Montreal, Que. grew up as a scorer. At 6-foot-4, with a strong base and a relatively low centre of gravity, Dort began to resemble the Hulk from the time he hit a growth spurt at age 15, so he didn’t have a problem powering his way to the rim throughout high school and AAU ball. Even in his lone year at Arizona State in 2018-19, Dort averaged a team-high 16.1 points on 12.6 field goal attempts per game, scoring 134 more points and taking 84 more field goal attempts than the next highest usage player on the team. 

But when Dort failed to hear his name called during the 2019 NBA Draft before signing a two-way contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder, he realized that scoring wasn’t enough — that he would have to shapeshift his game to get his foot in the door of the greatest league on earth. 

“Just the way that I got in the league, you know, I was an undrafted guy. I had to find one thing that I could do to stay on the court and prove to people that I deserve to be in this league and that was defence,” Dort told the media before the Thunder played the Toronto Raptors in March. 

“Since then, I’ve learned that I gotta learn a role to be able to get minutes and that worked for me my first year. I felt like I always had to adjust over the next couple of seasons, but every time I just gotta adjust and see what kind of team we have and what I can do to help the team win.”

Dort didn’t just prove he belonged as a defender; he blossomed into one of the very best point-of-attack defenders in the world — a lockdown wing who can guard everyone from Damian Lillard to Giannis Antetokounmpo in the same game, spending more time on the opponents' top option than almost anyone in the league. 

However, Dort was an inefficient offensive player for the first four seasons of his NBA career, making 39 per cent of his field goal attempts and 33 per cent of his threes as he developed his game on rebuilding Thunder teams. As his usage rate hovered around 20 per cent, Dort struggled to make good decisions with the basketball, taking some “wild shots,” as he put it, and barreling into defenders or turning the ball over on uncontrolled drives. 

But this year has been different. After signing a five-year, $87.5 million deal in 2022, Dort has been asked to do more with less — to scale up his offensive efficiency while scaling down his usage to allow rookie Chet Holmgren and sophomore Jalen Williams to see more of the ball while backcourt-mate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has blossomed into an MVP candidate. 

Dort has averaged 10.9 points, 3.6 rebounds and 1.4 assists per game, the lowest numbers since his rookie year. However, he has shot a career-high 50.6 per cent from two-point range, 39.4 per cent from three-point range, and 59.3 per cent true shooting, making it far and away the most efficient offensive season of his career. He has improved as a shooter, driver and decision maker, keeping the ball moving and hitting enough threes that teams can no longer sag off him to load up on others, opening up lanes for Gilgeous-Alexander and the other Thunder players to drive, which they do more than any team in the league.

“He’s had a breakout season, I think, more from an identity standpoint than a shooting standpoint,” Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault says. “He’s always been a great competitor, great defender, and a fearless offensive player, which I don’t think can be taken for granted.”

“I think sometimes those defensive guys, you also have to beg them to play offence and he’s never been like that. He’s always been aggressive. He was a scorer coming up, he was a scorer in college. And what he has learned is how to be an efficient version of himself in the NBA, and that’s where he’s really turned a corner.”

It’s a massively important development for a Thunder team that relies on Dort to lock up the opponent's best player but hasn’t always been able to rely on him on offence. However, by taking a jump on that end this season, Dort has proven to be a core piece of the Thunder, starting all 79 games he played and finishing most of them, too, helping the Thunder win 57 games this season — 17 more than last season, when they were eliminated in the Play-In Tournament — and achieve the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference with the third-ranked offence and fourth-ranked defence in the league. 

He also made himself into a core part of the Canadian men’s national team at the FIBA World Cup last summer, when Dort was "the X Factor," according to assistant coach Nathaniel Mitchell, coming off the bench to provide a spark for a Canadian team that finished third in the tournament and made history by qualifying for its first Olympic Games since 2000. 

“He's definitely gotten better,” Mitchell, who has coached Dort since 2017 when he joined Canada’s B Team for a summer competition, says. “Let's say he used to be like a bull in a china shop before, getting downhill, and I think he makes better decisions now.”

But where does that ability to adapt come from? It’s relatively easy to post big numbers on bad teams in the modern NBA, where pace and scoring are up to historic levels. But to go from an inefficient offensive player on bad teams to a hyper-efficient one on the best team in the West — all while continuing to be a monster defender — is something we rarely see. After all, it’s difficult to unlearn bad habits, and when players are pegged as “great defender, offensive liability,” it’s hard to shake that label.

Dort has done that. And he can thank himself and a couple of his youth coaches for having the foresight to understand where his career was headed and how to make him as resilient to change as possible by putting him in as many different situations as possible from an early age. 

Dort and his five siblings were raised in Montreal North by their mother Erline Mortel, a Haitian immigrant. After being a soccer goalkeeper for most of his childhood, Dort followed his older brother and best friend into basketball, travelling an hour and a half each way by bus to Parc Ex basketball club in the Parc Extension neighbourhood where he met his coach and future mentor, Nelson Ossé. 

Dort could barely make a layup when he tried out for the club team at age 12. But he was the last player picked due to his athleticism and physicality. “We got a little lucky, too,” Ossé says. After a few years of playing with Parc Ex in the winters and Brookwood Elite AAU in the summers, Dort hit a growth spurt in the summer and jumped up to 6-foot-4.

When he returned to Parc Ex, there was pressure on Ossé by the Montreal basketball community to move Dort up a year to play against older competition in the Montreal Basketball League, where he likely would have averaged 25 to 30 points, Ossé estimates. Instead, Ossé and Joey McKittrick — who runs Brookwood Elite and by this time was just as invested in Dort’s success as Ossé was — kept him down a level with the junior team and decided to put the ball in his hands, making him play point guard for the first time in his life. 

“He was ready to play the varsity team, but I kept him in the junior varsity team, you know, just because I wanted him to run the point,” Ossé says, adding that the varsity team already had two point guards which would have forced Dort to the wing, his natural position. “Me and Joey, we thought for his development at the next level it was actually better for us to keep him there and have him handle the ball most of the time.

“So, we challenged him sometimes not to really look to penetrate but actually to shoot the ball, to make decisions.”

Ossé and McKittrick understood that at the next levels, whether it was in college or the professional ranks, Dort wouldn’t just be able to power his way to the rim over smaller defenders. So, they wanted Dort to get ahead of it and learn a different skill set that would help slow the game down and make him a more versatile offensive player. 

“Most kids would have ran from the constructive feedback that Nelson and I gave him all the time, but he just was able to take it and it motivated him,” McKittrick says. “And that was a really big turning point for him in terms of his development basketball wise, because he became much more comfortable with the ball in his hands.”

Dort went on to play for three different prep schools and a season at Arizona State, having the ball in his hands the whole way through. So, when he adapted his game to become a defence-first player when he first joined the Thunder in 2019, he was just channeling the physical mindset that enabled him to make the Parc Ex team in the first place when he was 12 years old. And when he was asked to streamline his offensive efficiency this season, it wasn’t foreign to him, either. Dort already had an innate understanding of how to keep the ball moving, what shots to take, and how to adapt to different circumstances. 

“He’s laying off a lot of tough layups that were tough finishes in the past and passing the ball out or getting on to two feet and his three-point shot diet is very, very predictable and mostly just good, open shots and his efficiency is downstream with that,” Daigneault says. “So, he’s done a great job. He’s shown great maturity, he’s really channeled his aggression and it hasn’t made him any less fearless but it’s made him more of an impactful player for us.”

“Yeah, I think he's just taking better shots,” Jalen Williams says. “He's taking it upon himself to just find really good shots within the flow of offence. So, I think it's helped his percentage, because he’s been shooting the ball really well for the past couple years.”

“I think just finding what shots are the best for him and understanding what our team needs. He's been really good at that this year.”

Dort has played a number of different roles throughout his five seasons on the Thunder, where he is the longest-tenured player on the team despite just turning 25. It’s often not the sexiest job in the world, but it’s one of the most difficult — learning how to orbit around your superstar teammates, how to shapeshift your game to meet the team’s needs from one year to the next, and how to ultimately make yourself an invaluable part of an organization that signed you to a two-way contract after going undrafted out of Montreal. 

“It's not easy, but you've just got to find the right thing that's going to help you get on the floor,” Dort says about the advice he gives his young teammates. “And when you get on the floor, you can showcase your whole game.”

“And you're gonna get credit for that.”