Like most people involved with the UConn men’s basketball program in the mid-2000s, Patrick Sellers was particularly impressed with young Mark Daigneault, today the head coach of the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder and back then an undergraduate student-manager for the Huskies.

Sellers knew the big-name UConn players of that era — from Charlie Villanueva to Rudy Gay to Kemba Walker — were one step from fame and fortune in the NBA. He also sensed that Daigneault, an increasingly relied-upon member of Jim Calhoun’s staff over four years, had an incredibly bright basketball future.

“Mark was so confident, just so confident,” said Sellers, the Central Connecticut head coach who served as a director of operations and an assistant coach at UConn in 2004-10. “So I’d tell all those guys — Charlie, Rudy, Kemba — ‘You are going to be the stars, but this guy is going to end up making more money than all of you.’ Look at him now.”

Daigneault, a 2007 UConn graduate originally from Leominster, Mass., was named NBA coach of the year last week, having led the Thunder to the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference with a regular-season record of 57-25. Oklahoma City swept the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round of the playoffs and will face the Dallas Mavericks, beginning Tuesday, in the conference semifinals.

The Thunder, led by point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is one of the youngest teams in the NBA and Daigneault, 39, is one of only a handful of league coaches still in their 30s. The team could win a championship this year. If it doesn’t, it will be positioned to do so well into the future. So while Daigneault’s success is already something for UConn and New England to celebrate — his image is featured on a bus stop in his hometown, with the words ‘A Leominster Hero’ — it’s probably just gaining momentum, too.

Only the most intelligent and resourceful people earn the type of job that Daigneault is now thriving in, two decades after laying some initial career tracks as a teenager at UConn. There, he found ways to contribute during Calhoun’s famous staff meetings in the “bunker,” as associate head coach George Blaney’s right-hand man, as a versatile manager who multi-tasked his way through a college basketball experience.

Daigneault’s success, said Justin Evanovich, who spent nine years with the Huskies in the 2000s as a walk-on player and graduate manager, “is no surprise, but still impressive.”

“He came in as a young person, very mature,” said Evanovich, the manager so many others looked up to during that era. “That resonated with everyone. You think about large-scale basketball camps we were running, all the partners involved, 500 kids, 75 coaches, staff, the campus coordination. He was someone people went to for answers. I think people thought he was 35 years old. When they learned he was a freshman or sophomore and in charge, working with Coach Blaney, people were a little shocked. But he always possessed that maturity, intellect and professionalism and skill for collaboration, alignment. There are a lot of themes I could throw at you.”

Daigneault arrived at UConn in 2003 and quickly became close friends with another manager in the same class, Ben Wood, who is now an assistant on Sellers’ staff at Central after working for Bobby Hurley at Buffalo and Arizona State and Dan Hurley at Rhode Island. At UConn, Daigneault and Wood bonded over basketball, of course, but also Bruce Springsteen. Co-directors of the Jim Calhoun Basketball Camp, they became inseparable and remain so today.

Daigneault was the best man at Wood’s 2018 wedding in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Wood was the best man at Daigneault’s wedding a couple years later in Tampa, Fla. They still attend concerts together. Their families vacation together every summer on Cape Cod. They text and/or talk every single day. And every year, Wood and Sellers attend Thunder training camp to catch up with their friend and learn from him.

“Mark has earned it all,” said Wood, originally from Woodbury. “All his work is done behind the scenes. He’s not one to promote himself. But if you talk to anybody, there’s so much substance behind it all. He’s not fooling anybody with his success. He’ll listen and talk and take the temperature of the room and truly listen, not just listen to talk. He’s really good. It shows with how he interacts with players and the respect they have for him because it’s truly a two-way street, not a one-way road. His communication skills are really at a high level and he’s had that skill for a long time. It’s probably why he’s advanced so far. He’s an old soul, it seems like.”

Daigneault, born into a family of educators, was an education major at UConn. He embraced all the typical manager duties — basically helping players and coaches in any way the staff saw fit — but quickly distinguished himself with the way he viewed the game, related to people and found ways to help.

Only the most promising 22-year-old student-managers get offered a full-time job as a Division I assistant coach right out of college. After graduating from UConn in 2007, Daigneault was hired by Ralph Willard at Holy Cross, where Blaney (Class of 1961) played and later spent 22 years as coach (1972-1994).

“Coaching and education, I don’t think those two things are very far away on the Venn diagram,” said Evanovich, who is an associate clinical professor in UConn’s Neag School of Education, and the manager director of UConn’s Husky Sport program. “There’s certain values you practice. … He was ready for [coaching]. He gave a great level of investment. He had been around the UConn program and was ready to get out there and move on. Again, it’s not surprising. It just continues to be impressive.”

Daigneault spent three years as part of that staff in Worcester before becoming a graduate assistant under Billy Donovan at Florida in 2010-14. Along the way, he met Sam Presti, the Thunder general manager and also a Massachusetts native (Concord). Daigneault was hired by the Thunder as the coach of the organization’s G League (developmental) team, the Oklahoma City Blue. A year later, in 2015, Donovan left Florida to become Thunder coach, and he promoted Daigneault to a Thunder assistant coach in 2016.

“At the time, we were just trying to be involved,” Wood said of their early days together at UConn. “If you look at his track record, then he went back to being a GA at Florida. So he takes this huge leap, then goes back a few steps. Then he goes to the G League, but back then it was the D League and it wasn’t the same. I don’t think we really talked about pathways. We just loved basketball and tried to be involved. We didn’t have grandiose plans.”

When Donovan left OKC for the Bulls in 2020, Sellers texted Daigneault asking if he’d join Donovan in Chicago.

“I might have a chance here, Coach,” Daigneault wrote, as Sellers recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, that would be great.’ Mark still calls me Coach, and I don’t know why. I tell him it’s Patrick.”

Daigneault was named coach of the Thunder on Nov. 11, 2020.

“He was always shadowing Coach Blaney,” said Kyle Lyddy, another UConn manager whose time in the program overlapped with Daigneault’s. “He just separated himself early on from the typical managerial role, put himself in a position to learn. He was constantly listening. It was something I respect most about him was his ability to tune out all the noise and find solutions. I thought he was really good at navigating personalities, whether it was Hasheem Thabeet or a timid Gavin Edwards. He was able to relate to those guys by being present. I guess that’s the managerial role, finding a way to connect and being there when you’re called on. He was always there.”

Blaney and Tom Moore did most of the scouting reports in advance of games in those days, with Sellers and Andre LaFleur more focused on recruiting. Blaney leaned heavily on Daigneault and Wood in areas of film X’s and O’s preparation, film study and the like. Soon enough, Calhoun asked for them to sit on meetings in the bunker, and Daigneault was never shy or intimidated, and always prepared.

Daigneault’s distinctive temperament was always on display – intense and active but unflappable, seemingly never frazzled or rushed, calm and conversational, almost monotone. It’s about the process, he liked to say. He still does. Wood’s wife, Linsey, pokes fun at Daigneault for that quite often. The process, the process, right Mark? she’ll say to him again and again.

Daigneault’s wife, Ashley Kerr, was a gymnast at Florida, where she was the team’s manager for two years after graduation. She has been an assistant coach with the Oklahoma gymnastics team since 2017 and has been a member of multiple national championship coaching staffs.

The Daigneaults and Woods are part of a large circle of friends, many with Leominster or UConn ties.

“After every practice, Mark would go to every assistant coach and say, ‘What do you think?’” Sellers said of Daigneault’s time at UConn. “He would take notes. I’d say something like ‘Our ball-screen defense was weak today’ or ‘We didn’t box out today.’ I would give my two cents and he’d write it down. He’d go to Tom Moore, to Andre, to Coach [Calhoun]. And the next day, when we had the meeting, there would be a typed-out sheet based on our comments so we could prepare for practice. It was unbelievable. Mark was big-time, man. You can just tell when somebody’s got it. He had it. To me, it was his confidence. He was really smart and he kind of commanded the room, even at that young age.”

Lyddy ran a national association of collegiate basketball managers for about 10 years after graduating from UConn in 2009. Daigneault was involved as a resource, attending events, making himself available to men’s and women’s basketball managers who have certain aspirations. He has shown that the potential of the manager position is limitless.

“He started from the bottom and made his way up very quickly, networked very well, knew the right people, but beyond that, you don’t get to that level without knowing your stuff,” Lyddy said. “He was pulling guys aside, tactically, at UConn about X’s and O’s. It wasn’t just personalities, encouragement, what you’d expect out of a manager. It’s sometimes just ‘All right, man,’ and clapping it up. It was more tactical, which was impressive.”

Said Wood: “He’s just a regular guy. A regular guy who’s killing it right now.”