Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault has the best record of any coach in the NBA this season. And he has the second-best record of any coach in his house.
Daigneault is a coach, and a coach’s husband, too. His wife is Oklahoma assistant women’s gymnastics coach Ashley Kerr. She and the Sooners went 33-2 this season and won another national championship, their third in the last four years.
So, as Daigneault chases his first NBA title — he and the top-seeded Thunder open the NBA Finals at home against the Indiana Pacers on Thursday night — his wife has now been part of seven national championships over her career on the staffs at Florida and Oklahoma, the most recent of those coming just a few weeks ago as Oklahoma City was starting this playoff run.
Daigneault isn’t shy about touting the strengths of his wife’s resume, either.
“Among my wife and I, she is — by far — the more accomplished, more impressive, better coach,” Daigneault said. “She’s the real deal.”
It is a relationship born from ties to Florida. Daigneault — a Massachusetts native — was a student manager under Jim Calhoun at Connecticut, part of the team that won an NCAA championship there in 2004, then started his assistant-coaching career at Holy Cross for three years before moving on to Billy Donovan’s staff at Florida.