Gratitude. "Are you sustainable right now?” Donnie Strack asks Presti, because exercise, meditation and a stringent diet don’t ensure anything. He even went to Dee’s football games, eyeing the boy from the bleachers, as if he might glean inside info. "You know you shouldn’t be here,” Harriett Stevens told Presti during supervised study at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School, but he didn’t have a lot of other places to go.
But that night the Thunder were finalizing the extensions with Adams and Oladipo. For Sam Presti, the general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder, extreme displays of self-discipline are not a problem. “He’s the boss,” Adams says, “but he’s also a pretty average bloke.” He can’t stand to lose touch. “When you get to San Antonio,” Buford relented, “I want you to call this guy. Buford, who sometimes took an intern back to San Antonio with them. He wants the administrator to take the clearest ultrasound.He stretches himself, which is why he strode into Spirit Rock alongside 160 strangers on the morning of Sept. 3, his only companion a sack lunch from a nearby natural foods store in West Marin. Dig through his office, past the Frank Lloyd Wright books, the Miles Davis records and the magnetized quotes (“We don’t flinch”) and you will find his past in pictures: the Westbury shed, the San Antonio apartment, the AT&T Center seat, Jimmy Dee and Keenan Smith and Tyler Zander, now a first-year medical student at Oklahoma, posing with the doctor who cut off his leg.Then there are the images of Durant and Harden and Westbrook—the three players who have defined this NBA season—beamed every night to the world. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. Presti’s comments after Durant’s departure, like the ones after Westbrook’s injury in 2013, were peppered with the word gratitude. When Durant left, Presti did not seek sympathy from peers. It’s corporate.” You just have to decipher the Silicon Valley lexicon, deploying a “challenger spirit” instead of a “scarcity mind-set.”Strack has seen his friend mellow a bit with age. He leaped up the ladder, to basketball operations assistant and assistant general manager, constantly quizzing Buford on the CBA—even as the GM cleaned his garage. But we knew from our history the only way forward was to advance, to use our values as a launching point, to continue to create our future.”Presti stayed in Oklahoma City, attempting to buoy spirits during video conferences with colleagues from different departments, celebrating even the most minor accomplishments by the development group or the medical crew. They file into a two-story cedar building, place shoes in cubbyholes, pour cups of hot tea. Sam Presti, general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder (then Seattle SuperSonics), was quoted in The New York Times saying that Gordon's The Energy Bus is "a management book that shows readers how they can affect situations by how they frame them". But then he kept texting every couple weeks, and he still hasn’t stopped. “The day Enes started basketball workouts, Sam was out on the court, clapping him along,” Strack recalls. They don’t have the second pick, which is where they snagged Durant, or the third, which is where they gambled on Harden, or the fourth, which is where they shocked with Westbrook. I don't necessarily agree with that," Presti Presti added that the negotiations were not contentious after George made his request, which came after he was contacted by Kawhi Leonard to join the Clippers. That’s how you create environments where people feel connected and vulnerable.” The first picture chosen by the boy genius, now 40, was of his special ed teacher. They’d watch until 1 a.m., and then Presti would come back the next night, same bag jammed with new tapes. Presti recoils at the suggestion that any of those snapshots sting. After dinner, Carlisle asked Presti to write some advanced reports. Tom Farrell Sr. needed one camp counselor in the summer of 2000 and he offered the position to both of Emerson’s senior captains. 24, Adams at No. He recently ate lunch with Mrs. Stevens. "I just can't get into whatever the speculation is. In the 2009-2010 season the Thunder won 50 games. This may be a case of everybody winning, which is why the whole thing felt "mutual" to George.