Lu Dort is the undrafted elbow grease of the Thunder

Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

Lu Dort is the Thunder’s designated stopper, always taking the most difficult opponent assignment. It’s an on-its-face thankless role that he appears to relish with rare enthusiasm.

At the turn of the 19th century, the French God King Napoleon Bonaparte had a nagging, annoying problem on his hands. It was half a world away in Saint Domingue, on the west end of the Caribbean island known as Hispaniola. It was a wealthy, prosperous producer of plantation-based and slave-cultivated agricultural holdings like tobacco, coffee and sugar cane. The port served as a gateway between the old world and the new, and the substantial annual taxes it yielded to the French Crown on imports and exports were why Saint Domingue was referred to as The Pearl of The Antilles.

But now those taxes were imperiled. There was an insurrection led by self-liberated slaves on the island, inspired by the liberty their colonizers had taken for themselves by force in 1789. It had raged for over a decade, and the great general Toussaint Louverture had taken control of the island by fighting off British, Spanish, and French forces, declaring himself Governor for Life, and declaring the new country an autonomous, Black sovereign state. Enough was enough. Bonaparte sent his sister’s husband, the general Charles Leclerc, and an army of 20,000 soldiers to get it back.

The ensuing conflict went beyond any modern capacity for horror, even in war. There were mass hangings, drownings and gassings that some refer to as attempted genocide. The French did whatever they could to break rebel morale, to regain order and control and reinstall slavery, but nothing worked. The rebel forces used guerilla warfare, and surprise attacks to claim upset victories as the French forces were decimated by yellow fever (Including Leclerc, who died on the island of Tortuga). The rebels showed determination, burning their cities and forts to the ground rather than allowing the French to capture them. The French sent a Polish legion to aid in the war, but horrified by French brutality and inspired by rebel fortitude, they defected and fought with the rebels.

After the French eventually captured and killed Toussaint, he was replaced by his second in command, Jean Jaques Dessalines, and in 1802 the country was renamed Hayti, as an ode to its Taino origins. The French would continue their fruitless, brutal war until the juice no longer warranted the squeeze and they surrendered, frustrated and defeated. They did more than give up on their conflict. Because it was the key to this arm of their empire, Napoleon gave up on the new world altogether, and sold a large, wild, undeveloped chunk of the Southeast United States to then-President of the United States Thomas Jefferson.

Oklahoma City wing Luguentz Dort was born in Montreal, Canada — another former French colony — the child of Haitians who immigrated to join the 179,000-person Haitian diaspora in Canada, heading there from Saint-Marc when they were in their early 20s. His father drove cabs and his mother worked in a clothing factory. They spoke kreyòl in the house. But while Dort has been decorated and earmarked as a special talent at every level, from Quebec, to AAU, to Arizona State, his path to stardom is still fairly uncommon. In his one year at Arizona State, for perhaps the last time in his career, Dort showed flashes of becoming an elite offensive player, but would also go through some horrific shooting droughts.

In what may emerge as a theme of this piece, Dort stubbornly went against the conventional wisdom of the time, that he needed polish and seasoning, and declared for the draft after his freshman year. He went undrafted, but the Thunder, at the dawn of what would be one of the most remarkable tanks in NBA history, took a flier on him, signing him to a two-way contract. Perhaps Presti sensed the team needed to replace the recently departed Russell Westbrook’s stubborn, obnoxious energy, so they sought it out in the aggregate with Dort, and crucially, Chris Paul (Who dragged them to the playoffs and almost knocked out the Harden Rockets in 2020. You’ll never guess who was on Harden).

Dort recounts at an early, crucial developmental stage, Paul took him aside and explained the importance of effort and defense if you’re not the most skilled offensive player and still want to see the court in the NBA (Dort has subsequently started 296 of the 305 regular and postseason games he’s played for OKC). I’m friends with a member of the Thunder training staff who secretly tapes all the private conversations that happen between players in the weight room at the facility and he leaked this footage of that conversation to me:

The player that emerged from the “Poku” era of OKC was uncommonly resolute on defense. He’s a 6’4 two guard, which is the NBA equivalent of 5’9 on New York City Hinge; nothing special. But Dort looks like a much bigger person was boiled down, concentrated from stock to strong, pungent sauce. He’s a black hole, an incredibly dense, compact and iron-solid vacuum with his own orbit. He’s nine inches shorter than his teammate, Chet Holmgren, but has 20 pounds on him. He’s immovable and can guard players up to a head taller than him while also keeping up with the league’s most shifty and nimble guards. Dort is the only player in the history of the modern NBA who has never been insulted as “too small,” or had the cradle rocked at him, etc.

So you can’t move him off a spot and you can’t get past him, but this really only addresses his physical gifts. What makes Dort an elite defender is his will, his determination to push his body, to sacrifice it to degrees even the most bloodthirsty NBA psycho-energy guys can’t. This is purely a hypothetical, because I can’t imagine why anyone would ever do this, because it’s like choosing which type of poison you’d like to drink, but let’s say you went matchup hunting against the Oklahoma City Thunder defense. This would probably require you to switch off Lu Dort. But what you will find is you can run your fastest man off your largest and strongest in a pick and roll, or stack a Spain, or dribble alongside an oncoming city bus, but Lu Dort simply will not switch unless his coach tells him to. This goes somewhere past standard NBA defensive intensity, and borders on unhinged obsession.

It is gross and gauche and in entirely bad taste to discuss another man’s kink, but Lu Dort seems to get off, quite overtly, on the worst defensive assignments the NBA has to offer. Do you have a ball-dominant, maddeningly unguardable star that has turned impossible shotmaking into a nine-figure skill and draws absurd whistles? Oklahoma City has an answer for that. On a team of fresh-faced ingenues and preening lottery divas, Dort is the undrafted elbow grease, the flyover state obstinate spirit, the 25-year-old elder statesman, the pulsating Kompa drum pattern keeping time, the side of Pikliz with liberally applied scotch bonnet, the kicked up acid and heat cutting through the Thunder’s fatty chunk of pork griot.

The formal concept of the three-and-D Wing dates back roughly 20 years. Rashard Lewis is the first I can remember being referred to in this manner, and compensated in a way that reflected what would indicate the growing importance of the position to the modern game, but please, for once, I am actually asking an SB Nation reader to come for me in the comments, call me an idiot, and correct the record. I bring this up because I would argue that Lu Dort is not the “best” three-and-D wing we’ve ever seen, but he might be the most balanced? No one has melded the three and the D on the same level he has.

Players like him, perennial All-Defense types (You can tell how narrative-based and fucking bullshit All-Defense voting is because Dort has never made the team), specialists who made their bones as sturdy asshole perimeter monsters, are supposed to be minus offensive players. Tony Allen comes to mind, Bruce Bowen, there’s an entire history of them. But Dort has made himself into a real threat you can’t space off the floor. He’s raised his 3-point percentage 10 fucking points from his rookie season, from 29% to 39%, going from two attempts per game to five. That’s slightly better than his most obvious competition, Shane Battier, a career 38 percenter on 3.4 per game. On offense, he’s often not doing much as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander operates, but with his lofty percentage forcing defenders to stay home, the intangible loose ball situations when he’s a dive everywhere wrecking ball, and what he brings to the other end of the court, it’s more than enough.

By any metric, the Oklahoma City Thunder outkicked their coverage this season. They were League Pass darlings that somehow ended up with the best record in the West. They gutted the Pelicans (sans Zion) in a manner reminiscent of another young, talented Thunder squad we didn’t think was ready until they showed us their premature maturity and resolve. Of course, in their Western Conference Semifinals matchup with the Dallas Mavericks, Dort has the most difficult, and consequential assignment, on Luka Donçic. If the Thunder want to advance to the Conference Finals, they will need his specific brand of annoying intensity unsettling Donçic (who has accurately referred to Dort as a top-three perimeter defender in the league), stalking him baseline to baseline, constantly hand-checking, putting mustard on every foul, slamming knees and throwing elbows.

It’s a match made in heaven specifically for us. The nerds, the freaks, the Dort lovers who have scrolled this far through this piece.

Toussaint Louverture wasn’t granted the dignity of last words by his colonizers, but his final words on Haiti, as he was taken off his mother island by the cops whose empire he dissolved, were, “in overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of the Black liberty in St. Domingue—it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.” In this, we hear echoes of the demand, the resilient warning, “Respekte Nou”, the Kreyòl phrase Dort had custom made and printed on the back of his jersey in the NBA bubble in 2020, when he was still a legend in the making, the upstart agitator, confusing and frustrating whoever had the misfortune of matching up with him.

That phrase is in many ways his philosophy, the core of his game, the essence of his being, the message of the Haitian Revolution. In English, it translates to, “Respect Us.”