duncan228
09-09-2007, 10:45 AM
Still Spurs related? Put in NBA Central?
I'm so conflicted...I can't wait for the season to start so I know where to put stuff! :lol
http://www.nba.com/sonics/news/Carlesimo_070907.html
Sonics Q&A: P.J. Carlesimo
Ron Matthews, SUPERSONICS.COM
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's been a busy summer for new Seattle SuperSonics Head Coach P.J. Carlesimo. The day after he was introduced by the Sonics, Carlesimo was in Las Vegas to watch the Sonics in the NBA Summer League. After the Sonics played in the Rocky Mountain Revue Summer League, Carlesimo returned to Vegas to coach a Select Team of young NBA players that practiced against the U.S. Senior National Team. Back in Seattle and preparing for 2007-08, Carlesimo sat down with Ron Matthews earlier this week to recap the summer and set for the scene for the coming season.
Training camp is now less than a month away. How does that sound to you?
Sounds like it's too soon, to be honest with you. We're not where we would like to be, but that's inevitable in a first-year situation. We've got our coaches on board now. We've got to spend a lot of time together, but you're not going to get a continuity situation your first year so things will go more slowly this year than they normally would. Sometimes that's not a bad idea, to go back to basics and go a step at a time. There's going to be a lot to the learning process -- us learning about the players, the players learning about us and our system. It's just something we're going to have to get through. It's clearly going to be a little more tedious this year than you'd like it to be.
Between moving to Seattle, putting together a coaching staff and coaching the U.S. select team in Las Vegas, that's a busy summer. Have you had any time to relax and enjoy your new surroundings?
No. I'm enjoying being here for sure. It's not like we're killing ourselves, but no, there just has not been a lot of time this year, unfortunately. Circumstances have been exactly what we've talked about: two summer leagues, USA mini-camp, the actual USA Select camp, three days of the Jordan camp in Vegas and since we got here, between the move to the business offices being different, Furtado being slightly refurbished, renovated ... it's been everything in transition. But that's fine. This is the best year for all of that to be happening.
Speaking of Las Vegas, the Sonics were well represented with you, Nick Collison, Kevin Durant and Jeff Green. Did your coaching peers teams take notice?
We took a little bit of good-natured kidding about it, but it was just a great situation, especially for the young guys. It was really good for Nick and myself also, but for Jeff and Kevin, it really was another dimension to the summer league. I don't want to diminish what they did get accomplished in summer league, but I think they got so much more out of the USA Basketball experience because of who they were playing against and because, frankly, we weren't 100 percent. We had Mickael (Gelabale) and Johan (Petro) was all right, but we had a couple of guys banged up. If Jeff and Kevin would have gotten a lot of minutes playing with our other guys I think that would have really helped.
Ralph (Lewis) was the only coach in summer league who's back with us and we weren't all together last year. Next year, whoever is coaching the team, whether it's Ralph or Mark (Bryant) or BK (Brian Keefe) or any of our coaches, there will be continuity. They'll be teaching and coaching a system that we've all just done for the prior year. Our young players that will be playing in the summer league next year will be doing the same things they've been doing all during the course of the year. None of that was the case. It was just very makeshift. I thought Ralph and Brian (Gates) and Mike Brown did a really good job considering the circumstances but it's just circumstances you don't want to undergo. Summer league will be totally different next year and I think that's going to color the experience for our players a lot more than was the case this past year.
You worked directly with Jeff on the Select team. What were your first impressions of him?
That had already been crystallized a little bit by what I had seen in summer league. Jeff comes in, I think, a lot more complete player than usually you get a guy coming out of college, particularly somebody who hasn't been in college four years. I think that's a result of a) the program that he was in at Georgetown and JTIII (John Thompson III)'s coaching; secondly, the way they play at Georgetown is great preparation. I've heard some people say, 'Well, you know, they make a lot of passes, it's a five-man rotation, they don't play the way he's going to play in the NBA, they don't play a way that showcases individual talent.' I think there's an element of truth to that, but what it also does is it teaches you to play basketball. His ball skills are way above average. For a guy who's as talented as Jeff, as big and has played some inside, he handles the ball very, very well, particularly his passing. I think he's had great preparation for the NBA.
You could see already in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that his game is a simple game, simple in terms that he doesn't try to do things he can't do. He has all the skills you need from a player. He's not limited. He's not somebody that can just score or just rebound or just pass or just shoot. He's got a very well-rounded game and he's got a lot of poise for a young guy, an unusual amount of poise because he lets things come to him. When you watch him play, the more comfortable he became with the system Ralph was employing this summer, the more comfortable he became with his teammates, the more he showed. That was reflected again in the U.S. system. He was very comfortable playing against the best players in the league and he was comfortable playing with the other young guys. He and Aaron Brooks were the only rookies there. The other seven guys were all guys who had played in the NBA already. He fit in with them very well and I think Jeff, the better the talent you put him with, the more comfortable he is, the more you're going to see what he's capable of doing. This summer was very good for him.
Judging from the various reports out of Vegas, it seems both Kevin and Nick made strong impressions, too. What did you see and hear about each player during their time with Team USA?
Kevin and Nick, they did a really good job. I was working with Jeff specifically every day and usually we were playing against Kevin and Nick. I thought you had two different situations. First of all, Kevin had a great mini-camp, the three-day mini-camp where he left and actually missed our last two games in Las Vegas to go play in the mini-camp. He was unbelievable. If anything, he played significantly better with USA than he did in our games. Again, there's a comfort factor there. When you play with the level of competition and teammates that he was playing with on the USA senior national team, that was a great situation for Kevin. He played so well, particularly in that Blue-White scrimmage that was televised. ...
What Kevin had going against him from Day 1 was his youth. I think the intent, the original invitations to he and Greg Oden, were just that: to get them in the USA pipeline. They wanted them to get just a little touch of experience and see what's it's like playing with those guys, playing with that level of guy in the summer and to see what international competition was all about. I think the intent clearly was to let them touch it a little bit and see what it's like. Truth was, he played so well in the mini-camp that he kind of messed up their plans. ... He played so well. I really don't think their intent was for him to go in and tryout for the team; their intent was for him to practice with the team and it would help him more in the summers to follow and the Olympics to follow. But he played so well that they said, 'Whoa. Maybe we ought to take a look at him and consider him for the team.' As a result of that, it was a really good experience for him.
Nick deserved to make the team. It was unfortunate. The reason Nick was called upon was he had played so well for USA in the past. When they had a couple of injuries and they were really thin up front, Nick was supposed to go to the mini-camp also. He couldn't go to the mini-camp for a good reason: he was getting married. He came in after missing the three-day mini-camp and played extremely well. He made the decision very, very difficult for them. I think the combination of Chris Bosh getting hurt, they just were caught a little thin in terms of height. Again, it let them make a decision about Nick that was very tough. If you judged Nick on how he played for the week of practice, he would have had to make the team. Again, it was a good experience. It was a great way to spend a week in terms of guys staying in shape and working and improving their game in the summer, you don't get a better opportunity than those three guys got.
No matter how you slice it, it was a great experience for all three of our guys and something that is going to help us in the future. It helped all three of them in terms of individual improvement. ... It was all good. Vegas was good, despite the temperature, despite the fact that we all would have rather have been in Seattle, it was a great experience.
The Sonics received good news earlier this summer when Robert Swift was cleared for contact. Have you had a chance to see him work out? Early impression?
He's spending a lot of team working out with Brian Keefe and Mark. His primary time this summer was with (Assistant Coach of Player Development) Dwight Daub because he couldn't play basketball. But not long after Salt Lake City he got the OK from the medical people down in Los Angeles and ever since then he's added basketball. The thing I've been encouraged about was how hard he worked on his rehab and the physical conditioning he's done with Dwight. He put on 30-40 pounds of muscle. He looks very different than I recall him looking. I think the weight, strength and all of that conditioning is going to help him a lot.
What he needs more than anything is to stay healthy, to stay injury-free for a year and get some playing experience. I love what I've seen of his rehab and strength training, and I'm real encouraged by the individual things he's been doing, particularly working with BK and Mark and Ralph and our coaches right now. ... He needs basketball more than anything. I think a lot of our players are going to look forward to the start of training camp, but I can't believe anybody is going to be looking more forward than Robert because he's going to be playing basketball again.
How about the rest of the roster: Are guys excited about the direction the franchise is going?
I've had a chance to talk with everybody and meet with most of them. Again, it's a learning process. We've got new coaches across the board except for Ralph. We've got a number of new players: we've got Kurt (Thomas), we've got Wally (Szczerbiak), Delonte (West), Jeff and Kevin. That's five new guys and I believe that leaves nine returning players. You've got an awful lot of interaction in getting to know people, getting to play with people and even saying that, the nine we have returning, there's some very young guys in that group.
When you look at our new guys, the two oldest, I believe, guys on the team are Kurt and Wally, and they're new. This process is almost like an expansion situation. It's a very different process. But, the other way of looking at the nine returning guys -- Nick, Luke (Ridnour), Earl (Watson) -- they have played a lot of quality minutes. Earl in a couple different places. Nick's another one that suffered from injuries early in his career. Those guys have played quality minutes. Certainly when you factor in Delonte's experience, he started a ton of games for Boston. Wally's had a very good career in Minnesota and in Boston. And Kurt has been very successful everywhere he's been. One sense you say we're not very experienced were very young. The other sense you say, yeah, we're young but ...
Chris Wilcox kind of reflects the team. People have a tendency, Chris is so young, you forget he's been in the league five years. You look at him and you realize how old he is and you say, he's a very young big. Yeah, but he's played five years of NBA basketball. That's kind of what our team is like. We're young, but there's more experience there than you realize. That's a good thing. Now it's just a question of guys getting comfortable with each other and getting comfortable with the new system. It's a two-way street. We as coaches have to got to learn more about our players. We have to see how they're going to fit in and figure out the best way to utilize them, particularly on the offensive end, and we've got to make a lot of decisions about playing time, which are difficult decisions to make when you have a number of players of comparable talent. I think we have that. I don't think there's too many guys who stand out on either side of the spectrum.
We're going to really have some healthy competition for playing time. That's good and it's bad. It's good because guys are going to be hungry and their appetites are going to be such and they all know there's going to be a chance to play; it's bad because it's easy for coaches when things are kind of cut and dried, you know who your starters are, you know who are the guys who are going to get big minutes off the bench and you know who the guys who are not going to get those minutes are. That's not the situation we're looking at right now. It's going to make for an interesting training camp, it's going to make for a very interesting early season, frankly. It's going to take us a while before we have things sorted out in terms of utilizing this roster and making more important decisions going forward that Sam (Presti) and his people can act upon as we continue to tweak the roster.
We're 55 days away from the season opener in Denver. What do you see as your biggest challenge during that period?
The challenge you always have in a first-year situation: getting your system in. It's probably more challenging this year because of two factors: one, this will be the fourth head coach guys like Luke and Earl, I believe, have played for in four years. There hasn't been any continuity in the program, for a lot of reasons. That's not a criticism, it's just a fact. We don't have continuity.
The second thing is we're in the Western Conference. The Western Conference in the NBA as it is right now is as talented and as deep as any conference has ever been. You look at the 15 teams that comprise the Western Conference right now, there's very little let-up. The teams that weren't playoff teams, most of them are better; they've significantly improved their teams.
When you look at the lack of continuity from a coaching standpoint here combined with the fact that we've got five new players, most of whom or all of whom figure into the mix; it's not that you have five new guys. Sometimes you add a couple free agents or rookies, that's not what we did. We added five guys who are all going to be in the thick of things in terms of competing for minutes. Here's five new guys that somehow figure into the plan. A couple of them are young, very young, you've got a brand new coaching staff, you've got the Western Conference, you've got a lot of things that probably are not real high on the list of the way I'd like to spend my fall. It's going to be a challenge.
Having said that, the good news is there's young talent, there's enthusiasm and hopefully, we can start the process that was the contrast I was going to make: In San Antonio, the entire roster from last year is going to be back from last year, with the first nine or 10 players from the team that won a championship. Most of them have been there three, four, five, six, seven years together and they've been playing for the same coaching staff. 'Pop' (Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich) used to use a term 'corporate knowledge.' The corporate knowledge there is exceptional. Guys come in, they know the offensive sets, they know the defensive sets, they know the terminology, they know each other, they know the coaches and the coaches know them. That's what you want to build toward, where you have that.
Very seldom do you have a lot of changeover and a lot of players coming in and out, coaches coming in and out and all of a sudden things come together. What you're building toward is a situation where the majority, the nucleus of your team, remains intact. You keep that group together and they can improve and get better and better. We don't have that right now, but that's what we're building toward. But what we may have, which is the really good news, we may have a number of those pieces that are going to be there in the future. Hopefully we're going to have an awful lot of those pieces as we go forward from both a playing and coaching standpoint. If a lot of these pieces are as good as we hope they are, then they're going to be here for a while and that's a good situation.
I'm so conflicted...I can't wait for the season to start so I know where to put stuff! :lol
http://www.nba.com/sonics/news/Carlesimo_070907.html
Sonics Q&A: P.J. Carlesimo
Ron Matthews, SUPERSONICS.COM
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's been a busy summer for new Seattle SuperSonics Head Coach P.J. Carlesimo. The day after he was introduced by the Sonics, Carlesimo was in Las Vegas to watch the Sonics in the NBA Summer League. After the Sonics played in the Rocky Mountain Revue Summer League, Carlesimo returned to Vegas to coach a Select Team of young NBA players that practiced against the U.S. Senior National Team. Back in Seattle and preparing for 2007-08, Carlesimo sat down with Ron Matthews earlier this week to recap the summer and set for the scene for the coming season.
Training camp is now less than a month away. How does that sound to you?
Sounds like it's too soon, to be honest with you. We're not where we would like to be, but that's inevitable in a first-year situation. We've got our coaches on board now. We've got to spend a lot of time together, but you're not going to get a continuity situation your first year so things will go more slowly this year than they normally would. Sometimes that's not a bad idea, to go back to basics and go a step at a time. There's going to be a lot to the learning process -- us learning about the players, the players learning about us and our system. It's just something we're going to have to get through. It's clearly going to be a little more tedious this year than you'd like it to be.
Between moving to Seattle, putting together a coaching staff and coaching the U.S. select team in Las Vegas, that's a busy summer. Have you had any time to relax and enjoy your new surroundings?
No. I'm enjoying being here for sure. It's not like we're killing ourselves, but no, there just has not been a lot of time this year, unfortunately. Circumstances have been exactly what we've talked about: two summer leagues, USA mini-camp, the actual USA Select camp, three days of the Jordan camp in Vegas and since we got here, between the move to the business offices being different, Furtado being slightly refurbished, renovated ... it's been everything in transition. But that's fine. This is the best year for all of that to be happening.
Speaking of Las Vegas, the Sonics were well represented with you, Nick Collison, Kevin Durant and Jeff Green. Did your coaching peers teams take notice?
We took a little bit of good-natured kidding about it, but it was just a great situation, especially for the young guys. It was really good for Nick and myself also, but for Jeff and Kevin, it really was another dimension to the summer league. I don't want to diminish what they did get accomplished in summer league, but I think they got so much more out of the USA Basketball experience because of who they were playing against and because, frankly, we weren't 100 percent. We had Mickael (Gelabale) and Johan (Petro) was all right, but we had a couple of guys banged up. If Jeff and Kevin would have gotten a lot of minutes playing with our other guys I think that would have really helped.
Ralph (Lewis) was the only coach in summer league who's back with us and we weren't all together last year. Next year, whoever is coaching the team, whether it's Ralph or Mark (Bryant) or BK (Brian Keefe) or any of our coaches, there will be continuity. They'll be teaching and coaching a system that we've all just done for the prior year. Our young players that will be playing in the summer league next year will be doing the same things they've been doing all during the course of the year. None of that was the case. It was just very makeshift. I thought Ralph and Brian (Gates) and Mike Brown did a really good job considering the circumstances but it's just circumstances you don't want to undergo. Summer league will be totally different next year and I think that's going to color the experience for our players a lot more than was the case this past year.
You worked directly with Jeff on the Select team. What were your first impressions of him?
That had already been crystallized a little bit by what I had seen in summer league. Jeff comes in, I think, a lot more complete player than usually you get a guy coming out of college, particularly somebody who hasn't been in college four years. I think that's a result of a) the program that he was in at Georgetown and JTIII (John Thompson III)'s coaching; secondly, the way they play at Georgetown is great preparation. I've heard some people say, 'Well, you know, they make a lot of passes, it's a five-man rotation, they don't play the way he's going to play in the NBA, they don't play a way that showcases individual talent.' I think there's an element of truth to that, but what it also does is it teaches you to play basketball. His ball skills are way above average. For a guy who's as talented as Jeff, as big and has played some inside, he handles the ball very, very well, particularly his passing. I think he's had great preparation for the NBA.
You could see already in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that his game is a simple game, simple in terms that he doesn't try to do things he can't do. He has all the skills you need from a player. He's not limited. He's not somebody that can just score or just rebound or just pass or just shoot. He's got a very well-rounded game and he's got a lot of poise for a young guy, an unusual amount of poise because he lets things come to him. When you watch him play, the more comfortable he became with the system Ralph was employing this summer, the more comfortable he became with his teammates, the more he showed. That was reflected again in the U.S. system. He was very comfortable playing against the best players in the league and he was comfortable playing with the other young guys. He and Aaron Brooks were the only rookies there. The other seven guys were all guys who had played in the NBA already. He fit in with them very well and I think Jeff, the better the talent you put him with, the more comfortable he is, the more you're going to see what he's capable of doing. This summer was very good for him.
Judging from the various reports out of Vegas, it seems both Kevin and Nick made strong impressions, too. What did you see and hear about each player during their time with Team USA?
Kevin and Nick, they did a really good job. I was working with Jeff specifically every day and usually we were playing against Kevin and Nick. I thought you had two different situations. First of all, Kevin had a great mini-camp, the three-day mini-camp where he left and actually missed our last two games in Las Vegas to go play in the mini-camp. He was unbelievable. If anything, he played significantly better with USA than he did in our games. Again, there's a comfort factor there. When you play with the level of competition and teammates that he was playing with on the USA senior national team, that was a great situation for Kevin. He played so well, particularly in that Blue-White scrimmage that was televised. ...
What Kevin had going against him from Day 1 was his youth. I think the intent, the original invitations to he and Greg Oden, were just that: to get them in the USA pipeline. They wanted them to get just a little touch of experience and see what's it's like playing with those guys, playing with that level of guy in the summer and to see what international competition was all about. I think the intent clearly was to let them touch it a little bit and see what it's like. Truth was, he played so well in the mini-camp that he kind of messed up their plans. ... He played so well. I really don't think their intent was for him to go in and tryout for the team; their intent was for him to practice with the team and it would help him more in the summers to follow and the Olympics to follow. But he played so well that they said, 'Whoa. Maybe we ought to take a look at him and consider him for the team.' As a result of that, it was a really good experience for him.
Nick deserved to make the team. It was unfortunate. The reason Nick was called upon was he had played so well for USA in the past. When they had a couple of injuries and they were really thin up front, Nick was supposed to go to the mini-camp also. He couldn't go to the mini-camp for a good reason: he was getting married. He came in after missing the three-day mini-camp and played extremely well. He made the decision very, very difficult for them. I think the combination of Chris Bosh getting hurt, they just were caught a little thin in terms of height. Again, it let them make a decision about Nick that was very tough. If you judged Nick on how he played for the week of practice, he would have had to make the team. Again, it was a good experience. It was a great way to spend a week in terms of guys staying in shape and working and improving their game in the summer, you don't get a better opportunity than those three guys got.
No matter how you slice it, it was a great experience for all three of our guys and something that is going to help us in the future. It helped all three of them in terms of individual improvement. ... It was all good. Vegas was good, despite the temperature, despite the fact that we all would have rather have been in Seattle, it was a great experience.
The Sonics received good news earlier this summer when Robert Swift was cleared for contact. Have you had a chance to see him work out? Early impression?
He's spending a lot of team working out with Brian Keefe and Mark. His primary time this summer was with (Assistant Coach of Player Development) Dwight Daub because he couldn't play basketball. But not long after Salt Lake City he got the OK from the medical people down in Los Angeles and ever since then he's added basketball. The thing I've been encouraged about was how hard he worked on his rehab and the physical conditioning he's done with Dwight. He put on 30-40 pounds of muscle. He looks very different than I recall him looking. I think the weight, strength and all of that conditioning is going to help him a lot.
What he needs more than anything is to stay healthy, to stay injury-free for a year and get some playing experience. I love what I've seen of his rehab and strength training, and I'm real encouraged by the individual things he's been doing, particularly working with BK and Mark and Ralph and our coaches right now. ... He needs basketball more than anything. I think a lot of our players are going to look forward to the start of training camp, but I can't believe anybody is going to be looking more forward than Robert because he's going to be playing basketball again.
How about the rest of the roster: Are guys excited about the direction the franchise is going?
I've had a chance to talk with everybody and meet with most of them. Again, it's a learning process. We've got new coaches across the board except for Ralph. We've got a number of new players: we've got Kurt (Thomas), we've got Wally (Szczerbiak), Delonte (West), Jeff and Kevin. That's five new guys and I believe that leaves nine returning players. You've got an awful lot of interaction in getting to know people, getting to play with people and even saying that, the nine we have returning, there's some very young guys in that group.
When you look at our new guys, the two oldest, I believe, guys on the team are Kurt and Wally, and they're new. This process is almost like an expansion situation. It's a very different process. But, the other way of looking at the nine returning guys -- Nick, Luke (Ridnour), Earl (Watson) -- they have played a lot of quality minutes. Earl in a couple different places. Nick's another one that suffered from injuries early in his career. Those guys have played quality minutes. Certainly when you factor in Delonte's experience, he started a ton of games for Boston. Wally's had a very good career in Minnesota and in Boston. And Kurt has been very successful everywhere he's been. One sense you say we're not very experienced were very young. The other sense you say, yeah, we're young but ...
Chris Wilcox kind of reflects the team. People have a tendency, Chris is so young, you forget he's been in the league five years. You look at him and you realize how old he is and you say, he's a very young big. Yeah, but he's played five years of NBA basketball. That's kind of what our team is like. We're young, but there's more experience there than you realize. That's a good thing. Now it's just a question of guys getting comfortable with each other and getting comfortable with the new system. It's a two-way street. We as coaches have to got to learn more about our players. We have to see how they're going to fit in and figure out the best way to utilize them, particularly on the offensive end, and we've got to make a lot of decisions about playing time, which are difficult decisions to make when you have a number of players of comparable talent. I think we have that. I don't think there's too many guys who stand out on either side of the spectrum.
We're going to really have some healthy competition for playing time. That's good and it's bad. It's good because guys are going to be hungry and their appetites are going to be such and they all know there's going to be a chance to play; it's bad because it's easy for coaches when things are kind of cut and dried, you know who your starters are, you know who are the guys who are going to get big minutes off the bench and you know who the guys who are not going to get those minutes are. That's not the situation we're looking at right now. It's going to make for an interesting training camp, it's going to make for a very interesting early season, frankly. It's going to take us a while before we have things sorted out in terms of utilizing this roster and making more important decisions going forward that Sam (Presti) and his people can act upon as we continue to tweak the roster.
We're 55 days away from the season opener in Denver. What do you see as your biggest challenge during that period?
The challenge you always have in a first-year situation: getting your system in. It's probably more challenging this year because of two factors: one, this will be the fourth head coach guys like Luke and Earl, I believe, have played for in four years. There hasn't been any continuity in the program, for a lot of reasons. That's not a criticism, it's just a fact. We don't have continuity.
The second thing is we're in the Western Conference. The Western Conference in the NBA as it is right now is as talented and as deep as any conference has ever been. You look at the 15 teams that comprise the Western Conference right now, there's very little let-up. The teams that weren't playoff teams, most of them are better; they've significantly improved their teams.
When you look at the lack of continuity from a coaching standpoint here combined with the fact that we've got five new players, most of whom or all of whom figure into the mix; it's not that you have five new guys. Sometimes you add a couple free agents or rookies, that's not what we did. We added five guys who are all going to be in the thick of things in terms of competing for minutes. Here's five new guys that somehow figure into the plan. A couple of them are young, very young, you've got a brand new coaching staff, you've got the Western Conference, you've got a lot of things that probably are not real high on the list of the way I'd like to spend my fall. It's going to be a challenge.
Having said that, the good news is there's young talent, there's enthusiasm and hopefully, we can start the process that was the contrast I was going to make: In San Antonio, the entire roster from last year is going to be back from last year, with the first nine or 10 players from the team that won a championship. Most of them have been there three, four, five, six, seven years together and they've been playing for the same coaching staff. 'Pop' (Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich) used to use a term 'corporate knowledge.' The corporate knowledge there is exceptional. Guys come in, they know the offensive sets, they know the defensive sets, they know the terminology, they know each other, they know the coaches and the coaches know them. That's what you want to build toward, where you have that.
Very seldom do you have a lot of changeover and a lot of players coming in and out, coaches coming in and out and all of a sudden things come together. What you're building toward is a situation where the majority, the nucleus of your team, remains intact. You keep that group together and they can improve and get better and better. We don't have that right now, but that's what we're building toward. But what we may have, which is the really good news, we may have a number of those pieces that are going to be there in the future. Hopefully we're going to have an awful lot of those pieces as we go forward from both a playing and coaching standpoint. If a lot of these pieces are as good as we hope they are, then they're going to be here for a while and that's a good situation.