IN THE SECOND half of Game 7 of the Houston Rockets’ first-round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2020, NBA analyst Mark Jackson and his broadcast partner Mark Jones couldn’t believe what they were watching.
All night they’d been watching the NBA’s leading scorer, James Harden, battle Luguentz Dort, who until then was an unknown Thunder rookie. And Harden was miserable. Everywhere he went, Dort followed him.
With 2:55 remaining in the third quarter, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni called a play, hoping to get Harden some air.
The plan was to set three screens for the Rockets All-Star to get some separation from the burly, relentless rookie who’d hounded Harden for the entire series.
First it was Danuel House, who set a screen for Harden as he ran cross-court at the elbow. Then, immediately, P.J. Tucker behind House; then, finally, Jeff Green.
With space, the thinking went, Harden could’ve turned the corner and driven toward the basket for either a layup or a pass to each screener, rolling to the basket.
But Dort powered through all of them. Harden, exasperated, looked on as each opening quickly closed, then settled for yet another long 3-pointer that clanked off the front of the rim.
“They set three screens for him,” Jackson said, empathizing with Harden’s plight. “But Dort was able to follow through all three of them and get back into the picture.”
It was that game — and this play — when Dort started to realize just how big of an impact he could make on the game.
“That was my rookie year, so I wasn’t really noticing that I’m actually that good of a defender yet,” Dort told ESPN. “So when they sent those three screens at me, I was like, ‘God, they trying that much just to get me off his body?'”
They were. By the end of the game, Harden was exhausted and had made just 4 of 15 shots, including 1-for-9 on 3-pointers, and finished with 17 points, half his season average.
“I can see when someone is getting uncomfortable,” Dort said. “They’ll start calling for screens and they want the screener to take my head off. That’s the point where I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I got it. He don’t like me.'”
Dort didn’t say anything to Harden during the game or after. He never talks trash unless someone says something to him first.
“There’s no reason for me to say anything,” Dort said. “Because I already know you’re in hell right now.”
That hell would soon have a name, “The Dorture Chamber,” and Dort has been placing the NBA’s biggest starts inside of it ever since.
WHEN DORT IS asked what he wishes people knew about him, he responds quickly and plainly.
“That I’m not a villain,” he said.
This time of year, it’s a name he gets called a lot.
“I’m always on the best players, so I am trying to make the job tough for them,” Dort said. “But other than that, I’m a chill, cool guy.”
Whereas other defensive stoppers lean into the villain mentality — Dillon Brooks literally calls himself Dillon the Villain — Dort doesn’t seek such a moniker. If your favorite player has a bad game against Dort, or comes away from the matchup injured, like Ja Morant did in the Rockets’ first-round series versus the Grizzlies, Dort said he does feel badly about it.
“He’ll come into the locker room after the game, after something happens, and he’ll tell us, ‘Obviously I didn’t mean to hurt him,'” Thunder teammate Aaron Wiggins told ESPN.
But for Dort, this is basketball: Each matchup is a zero-sum game. He wins or he loses.
“He’s like a gnat just constantly poking at you,” Wiggins said. “You can’t get rid of it unless you really kill it. But you can’t kill him. No. He’s going to keep chasing you.”
His job is to stop the other team’s best player. If he doesn’t do his job, he worries he won’t have one anymore.
This might sound hyperbolic for a player who signed a five-year, $87.5 million contract in 2022 and finished fourth in this season’s Defensive Player of the Year voting.
But Dort has seen firsthand how quickly his basketball life can change and isn’t about to go back to a place where that can happen to him again.
Wiggins understands. They played against each other in high school. Wiggins at Wesleyan Christian in North Carolina, Dort at one of the three different prep schools in Florida that he attended after leaving his home in Montreal at age 16.
Back then, the best Canadian players often went to prep schools in the United States to increase their visibility and level of competition.
Dort’s teammate, newly minted MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, left his home in Toronto at 17 and went to high school in the states.
“When I left Montreal at 16, I could barely speak English,” Dort said. “I had to go to Jacksonville. It was a total culture shock. But it kind of built me as a person.”
He was away from home and everything he’d ever known, growing up as the son of Haitian immigrants in Montreal Nord.
“It’s a tough neighborhood, tough place to be raised,” said Nelson Osse, who was Dort’s first basketball coach and guided him through AAU ball and high school. “A lot of Lu’s friends ended up in gangs and stuff like that.”
As he developed, Dort’s reputation grew enough — he was a five-star recruit as a junior — that he was able to return to Canada as a senior.
He chose to play for Bobby Hurley at Arizona State. Right away, Hurley said he could tell Dort had NBA potential.
“His year with me was the first time and the only time I’ve swept Arizona,” Hurley told ESPN. “And when I rolled into Tucson with him, and he got off the bus, I felt like we got a real shot to compete with the athletes that Arizona generally gets.
“It gave me a different level of confidence as a coach, knowing the physicality he had, and the athletic ability, how hard he played. I knew we would have a chance to win.”
At the time, the only knock on Dort’s game was an inconsistent shot. But he still averaged 16 points per game as a freshman and was projected by most draft experts to be a late-first-round or early-second-round pick.
Hurley raved about him to anyone who called to ask about Dort’s work ethic and character. He told them a story of how well Dort handled a benching after a poor performance against Colorado in the Sun Devils’ Pac-12 home opener.
“For a five-star kid to just, when I put him in the game, play as hard as he did every other game and never put his head down, it was really impressive,” Hurley said. “A lot of kids would get hung up on something like that, but Lu never cared or thought about anything like that.”
So when it came time to bless Dort’s decision to enter the NBA draft after just one season, Hurley didn’t hesitate.
In fact, he went to New York City with him and his family. But instead of celebrating, they waited, unexpectedly sitting in the draft’s green room inside Barclays Center for hours.
Thirty players heard their names called in the first round. ESPN’s draft board had Dort on its list for best available players for ages. The second round started around 9:30 p.m. and was a blur.
There were three minutes between picks then. Five names came off the board. Still nothing. Another five. Nothing. Five more.
Dort and his family continued their painful wait, the room becoming emptier and emptier.
His name was never called.
To this day, the reasons for Dort’s precipitous fall are muddled.
One former general manager told ESPN that Dort had a poor individual workout in front of several teams that led to questions about his shooting and ball handling.
Another executive speculated that teams couldn’t decide if he projected as a 3-and-D player or a scoring guard.
Dort realized something had gone haywire. Teams were calling his representatives to see whether he’d consider playing overseas for a few years. Others were offering nonguaranteed two-way deals.
One of those teams was the Thunder. As fate would have it, Arizona State was placed in the Tulsa Regional of the NCAA tournament that year, and OKC’s executive vice president and general manager Sam Presti had come away impressed with Dort’s physicality and determination.
Dort left Barclays Center in the middle of the NBA draft’s second round.
A few hours later, he agreed to a two-way contract with the Thunder.
“We all cried. Not only him, I cried. His mom cried. We all prayed for him,” Osse told ESPN. “The expectations were so high. What we thought was going to be a party ended up like a funeral. But once Lu got that call from the Thunder, and they were going to sign him to a two-way, there was no time for him to cry anymore.
“He was going to prove to the league that they made a mistake. That was his mentality. He wasn’t cursing at anyone. He wasn’t blaming anyone. It was just, ‘You know what? They made a mistake and then I’m going to show them why.'”
DORT BARELY SLEPT that night. The sooner he could get out of New York and to the place that actually wanted him, the better, he thought.
So he boarded a flight to Oklahoma City the next morning and went straight to the practice facility.
Presti was waiting for him with a card — and a message.
“This isn’t the end of your story,” Presti told him. “It’s the beginning.”
Then Presti outlined a developmental plan and told him that if he followed it, the Thunder believed he could be a strong NBA player.
“I had so many emotions when I got here,” Dort said. “I was sad, I was pissed. But I was also like, ‘Thank God they gave me this opportunity.'”
Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault was on that season’s staff of the Oklahoma City Blue, the Thunder’s G League team, and happened to be in the gym to put Dort through his first official workout that afternoon.
Later that evening, Dort used a ride-hailing service to get to the temporary housing the team sets up for its G Leaguers. He did not have a car or any other creature comforts that first summer.
Eventually, he convinced his friend, Greg Gilman, who’d been the student manager for the Sun Devils, to move out to OKC to help him train.
Dort would scroll through Instagram and see scenes and photos of his friends having fun back in Tempe, or rivals from his draft class enjoying their newfound riches. When doing so got too depressing, especially late at night, he and Gilman would head back to the gym.
“It’s Oklahoma City in the summer,” Dort said. “It’s hot. There’s bugs. It smelled like dog food.” (There’s a dog food plant near the OKC Blue training facility).
But Dort had a blueprint to get to the NBA, and he was going to stop at nothing to follow it.
“It was different for both of us,” Gilman said. “I’m from Phoenix, he’s from Montreal. Here we are in the middle of Oklahoma. Oh my God. But it was peaceful, and there’s not as much to do. So there’s this sense that there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own destiny. The distractions aren’t there. You can make this opportunity what you want out of it.”
DORT WAS EVERYTHING Presti and the Thunder hoped he’d be during the first part of the 2019-20 season.
His defensive ability was unquestioned. And when the two guys ahead of him in the pecking order, Hamado Diallo and Terrance Ferguson, got injured, Dort got the call.
In early December, OKC was about to go on a road trip to Portland, Utah, Sacramento and Denver. At the time, that meant matching up with Damian Lillard, Donovan Mitchell, Buddy Hield and Jamal Murray. It was a perfect test.
Lillard shot 8-for-24, Mitchell went 10-25, Hield 9-24 and Murray 6-for 15 — all put in Dort’s early chamber for parts of the game.
By the time the Thunder made a pleasantly surprising playoff run as the NBA resumed play in Orlando, Florida, following a four-month hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dort had become a fixture in the rotation.
It’s how he ended up on then-eight-time All-Star Harden in Game 7 and made his life such hell that D’Antoni called for three screens just to get Dort off him, if only for a moment.
“He’s kind of like artificial intelligence because once he learns something,” Gilman said, “it compounds and he learns it very quickly.”
In last season’s playoffs, when the Thunder faced the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round, Wiggins noticed Dort had picked up on a Brandon Ingram tell, something Ingram liked to do to set up one of his best moves.
Every time Ingram crossed the ball through his legs, looking to drive, Dort identified it almost immediately.
“He’ll cut off a specific move that he recognizes,” Wiggins said. “So now [Ingram] has to find something else.”
Ingram shot just 35% percent in the series and averaged just 14 points, as Oklahoma City swept New Orleans.
THAT RELENTLESSNESS HAS translated to the offense, too.
Dort isn’t a naturally gifted shooter, but now he makes more than enough of his shots to keep defenses honest. After shooting 29.7% from 3 during his rookie season, he made over 41% this season on more than five attempts per game.
“I watched a lot of film to see how teams were guarding me,” Dort said. “And I realized that if I played [offense] the way I play defense, and I’m able to knock down some big 3s for my teammates, we’re going to be hard to stop as a team.”
And little gets the Oklahoma City crowd going like a flurry of Dort’s moon ball 3-pointers splashing through the net.
That’s how the Thunder won Game 5 of their second-round series against the Nuggets earlier this month. Dort shot just 1-for-4 from 3 in the first three quarters, then, in a span of 2:01 of game time, hit three in a row.
“That just speaks to the worker and the person he is to step into those shots with confidence,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Obviously they were guarding us a certain way. Those shots were there, but they weren’t falling. So his braveness to shoot them and confidence to take them was huge, but nothing out of the ordinary. That’s who Lu is.”
Still, Dort’s calling card remains.
On Thursday, he earned his first All-Defensive Team nod after ranking among the NBA’s best in various defensive categories, including in the top 10 in defensive halfcourt matchups against 2025 All-Stars this season, per GeniusIQ tracking.
For six years now, he has been assigned to trail opponents’ most dangerous players — no matter if it’s a guard such as Harden or a power forward such as Minnesota’s Julius Randle.
Randle dominated the first half of Game 1 in these Western Conference finals, scoring 20 on eight shots. But then the Dorture began.
It was almost hard to watch Dort body Randle four straight times with 7:02 remaining, only for Dort to pull the chair on him as the 250-pound forward tried to back him down.
Randle crashed to the floor, untouched. Dort stole the ball from him and fired a pass to Alex Caruso to ignite a Thunder fast break.
Randle could only look on as Gilgeous-Alexander raced past Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards for a layup to increase the lead to 13.
OKC won by 26.
“He’s always playing against everybody’s favorite player,” Gilman said. “The other team’s ‘hero.’ So what’s the yin and yang of that? He’s the villain. He’s Lu the Beast. The Dorture Chamber. But if you know him as a person, you know it’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“He’s a grizzly bear on the court and a teddy bear off the court.”
