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Long live the OG, the NBA’s unheralded tone-setters – The Athletic
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Two victories away from celebrating the first NBA Finals championship in franchise history, the Denver Nuggets are in a too-small visitors’ locker room, generally pleased with a Game 3 win in Miami, while a crush of media and assorted hangers-on crowd their space.
In a corner to the left, forward Michael Porter Jr. is still coming to grips with having shot just 1 of 7, finishing with a season-low two points, after having gone 2 of 8 the previous game. Denver has the advantage, but the Nuggets need their third-leading scorer on the season to overcome this funk if they are to quickly dispatch of Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat.
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Veteran center DeAndre Jordan realizes as much. Though he hasn’t played a minute in the series, he quietly steps over, pulls Porter aside and, out of earshot of any prying microphones and cameras, delivers a quick pep talk and some words of advice for the fourth-year pro.
“Mike is a talented player, but he’s also young too,” Jordan says when asked the next day to recount the conversation. “So, ups and downs, not shooting the ball well, or shooting well, we want him to stay focused. That’s all I was voicing to him, and he took it really, really well.”
How much impact did Jordan’s words have? Who can say? And how do I not have a stat for this?
But Porter would go on to score 11 points in the next game and add 16 points, 13 rebounds and three assists in the Game 5 clincher.
What Jordan did after Game 3 is an increasingly common job description in NBA locker rooms. Call it the “OG”: a veteran who rarely or never plays but is there on the bench and in the locker room for the express purpose of using his experience to help the other players along.
Last year the Nuggets actually had three “OGs” — Jordan, Jeff Green and Ish Smith. Green played a major on-court role, but Jordan and Smith were mostly sages at the end of the bench, helping the younger Nuggets get their bearings. When asked about it in June, Jordan was quick to point out that Green was the oldest of the bench and he was a mere “junior OG.”
Not anymore; with Green gone to Houston, the 35-year-old Jordan is the wise old man in Denver. Newcomer Justin Holiday — a mere pup at 34 — is there riding shotgun, but Jordan is the OG emeritus. He has only played one game this year, for a total of 12 minutes, but the Nuggets brought him back in part to be the veteran mentor for the six Denver players in their first or second season.
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That formula helped bring Denver to the promised land, which is why the Nuggets have a little-used vet on their roster despite leaning into a future-focused program of restocking this year’s bench and despite a luxury-tax position that makes Jordan’s $2 million cap hit cost the Nuggets an additional $5 million in tax payments … money Denver could avoid paying entirely if it just went with the minimum of 14 players rather than 15.
Ironically, the model for the “OG” roster spot was the team Denver defeated in last season’s NBA Finals. For nearly a decade, the Heat kept a roster spot warm for Udonis Haslem despite hardly ever playing him and despite often keeping the roster below the maximum to sidestep the luxury tax. That Game 3 in Miami was a path-crossing of sorts; Haslem’s 29-second outing on the same night marked the OG’s last NBA appearance.
Amazingly, he was still on the Heat roster at 43 despite not having played regularly since 2015. Starting in 2018, the Heat played in 71 playoff games, and Haslem played a grand total of just two minutes and 57 seconds in them. In his final seven NBA seasons, he played a total of 65 games, or about nine a year, and a total of 477 minutes. In 2020-21, he played one game the entire season … and was ejected after two minutes.
Udonis Haslem makes his first appearance of the season for the Heat and gets ejected after two minutes for getting into it with Dwight Howard.
🎥: @BleacherReport pic.twitter.com/SNYfjOgvfI
— USA TODAY NBA (@usatodaynba) May 14, 2021
Haslem is still in that role to some extent, but no longer as a player: He’s now with Miami’s front office as Vice President of Basketball Development. (Disappointingly, the title “Vice President of #HeatCulture” was not bestowed on him.)
But for eight years, the Heat never doubted for a second whether it was worth the cost of keeping him around, even at the expense of burning a potentially useful roster spot.
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“[Haslem] has such an illustrious history with our organization,” said Heat coach Erik Spoelstra. “If you come through our doors, he’s one of the first people you meet. He was and will continue to be a caretaker for our culture. He cares about it so much. Players come in, they know who he is. He has that instant credibility because of all the time he’s had with our organization.”
With last season’s two finalists as the model, it’s only natural that they have spawned imitators. Of course, there has always been room for an OG on certain NBA benches, and the drift toward doing this intentionally has been several years in the making. For instance, one of Flip Saunders’ first moves in Minnesota in 2015 was to bring in veterans Kevin Garnett, Tayshaun Prince and Andre Miller to whisper in the young ears of Zach LaVine, Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns.
In the current NBA, there seems to be a bit more intent about getting the right kind of veteran to fill the role, especially in cities where they already have currency. It’s no accident Tristan Thompson returned to Cleveland, Derrick Rose went to Memphis, Robin Lopez landed back in Milwaukee or beloved behemoth Boban Marjanović is once again in Houston.
The most prominent example, however, may be 37-year-old Garrett Temple. Much like Haslem, he was an undrafted player from the SEC who is now well into a second decade in the league. Temple only played 25 games for New Orleans last season and has essentially transitioned into the OG role in Toronto, one the Raptors recruited him to fill. He and fellow vet Thaddeus Young are the locker room sages showing young teammates such as Scottie Barnes and Gradey Dick how to be pros.
“It was like this the last two years in New Orleans,” said Temple of his former team, where he also had several young players around to receive his wisdom. “It’s a delicate balance of not talking too damn much, but making sure guys understand I have information; I’m gonna hand you some, but I don’t want to be overbearing.
“You don’t know how to be a pro until you learn how to be a pro. Sometimes if you don’t have any good vets to take you under their wing, you can figure it out … it takes you a little longer, though. Having somebody who can show you those shortcuts, it makes it easier for you.”
“They just have more accountability when its coming from [another] player,” said Raptors coach Darko Rajaković. “I love that. I love empowering guys so they can communicate and talk and be on the same page. I think that’s the way you really build the trust, and going through unpleasant situations.”
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That’s a common thread throughout the NBA … that the same message just lands differently when it’s coming from a fellow player, even from one who is hardly playing.
“Coaches understand what will be better coming from me or Thad,” said Temple. “They’ll say, ‘I see this. Can you be the one to tell them?’ And I’m very open to that. We had a great group of rookies and young guys in New Orleans. Here, it’s the same. They’re very receptive, competitive, they understand, ‘I don’t know everything, so teach me.’”
That message can take different forms. Sometimes it’s technical, basketball stuff: how to slip a screen or shade a ballhandler to his weak hand. Sometimes it’s emotional, as with Jordan’s post-Game 3 pep talk with Porter.
Often, however, it’s about dealing with everything else: eating, road trips, game-day preparation and the extended grind of an NBA season.
“It’s the food, it’s understanding what time this certain thing is, what time I should eat breakfast, how to figure out my body,” said Temple. “Having a routine, it makes things so much easier. Those little things help you produce on the court because it’s less mental fatigue. You’re not thinking about it.”
However, there is a scarcity issue that prevents this model from being replicated more widely. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of role-model-caliber players in their mid-30s looking to become minimum-contract mentors.
And even if there were more, the pressures of the league and of team-building can make it difficult to keep even well-liked veterans on the roster. Indiana, for instance, was extremely pleased with James Johnson as its locker room OG a year ago … but still cut him at the trade deadline to enable a multi-player trade to be completed.
“It’s really challenging,” said Spoelstra of that roster decision. “I think every organization would love to have that position. But because there’s so much turnover in the league, I don’t know if it always resonates in every single locker room.”
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For some it’s a stage to be passed through on the way to retirement than a Haslem-esque career opportunity; Andre Iguodala was a veteran mentor in Golden State a year ago, appearing in just eight games at the age of 39, but now he’s retired and the acting head of the National Basketball Players Association.
With Iguodala and Haslem gone, Temple and Jordan are the two oldest non-rotation players in the league, but the OG ranks are slowly growing. Jordan’s former teammate Smith is now dispensing his wisdom to LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller in Charlotte, while Atlanta’s Wesley Matthews still probably plays too much to be a true OG but is trending in that direction.
As for the demands of this gig? It’s a bit humbling, sure, but the rewards included Jordan’s first NBA Finals appearance and championship ring.
“It’s definitely an adjustment,” said Jordan about the NBA equivalent of a non-speaking role. “When you’re a competitor, any way you can still have an impact or an impact on the game, help your teammates excel and win, that’s what I want to do. If I wasn’t doing that, then I would be doing myself and my team a disservice.”
(Illustration: Samuel Richardson / The Athletic; photos of Jordan, Temple and Thompson: Gary Dineen / NBAE via Getty Images; Cole Burston, Amanda Loman / Getty Images)
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John Hollinger ’s two decades of NBA experience include seven seasons as the Memphis Grizzlies’ Vice President of Basketball Operations and media stints at ESPN.com and SI.com. A pioneer in basketball analytics, he invented several advanced metrics — most notably, the PER standard. He also authored four editions of “Pro Basketball Forecast.” In 2018 he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Follow John on Twitter @johnhollinger