John Calipari media day transcript
By Jason Marcum
Q. Coach, you were asked about the point guard position. Who’s going to be the backup point guard? Will it be Polson? If not, is that something you’re working on?
COACH CALIPARI: Still trying to figure it out. There’s two parts of this. You’ve got to keep some of these guys on the floor. No one is going to play 40 minutes, but you need to keep guys out there 30, 32 minutes, especially early, until they get a feel for what they’re doing, especially against good teams.
I think what’s going to happen, the way they’re calling fouls, all of us coaches are going to have to adjust. You can argue the point, but we’re all going to have to adjust. And that being said, I think there’s going to be enough playing time, because of fouls, for everybody. So if you do have a deep team, you’ve got an advantage if they call these fouls.
Q. You haven’t done much of anything defensively, but just athleticism wise, can this be one of your better defensive teams and the potential there for that?
COACH CALIPARI: There’s no the reason ’12 was so good is that you had Michael Kidd, who could guard all five positions and guarded their best player, and if he had any slip ups, you had a kid I think his name was Anthony Davis behind there, blocking everything in sight. And the other guys were physical enough to guard and do their thing.
I don’t know. You don’t have an Anthony, even though we have some good shot blockers, and I don’t know if we have a Michael Kidd because Michael had the combination of toughness, mental toughness, and length to do it and athleticism. So that ended up making that team the best defensive team in the country.
So this team has a chance but for different reasons. Your guards are bigger. Your length you know, you’re big at every position.
Q. John, is there any unique challenge at all to coaching identical twins? If you have to get after one, maybe the other one doesn’t like that?
COACH CALIPARI: No, they get on each other. They are and their personalities are really different. I mean, they’re what they the more I’m around them one, they’re great kids. Everybody that’s come through the building, every scout, all this, the myth about them is being blown up because you see, when they’re being challenged and being coached, they respond the right way.
What they don’t know how to respond to and neither did Derrick Rose, some of my best players. They don’t know how to respond when they don’t make a shot or they turn it over. That’s what they’re learning. Like they get upset on a missed layup except we tip dunked it. So why are you upset? I should have made it. No, we won the game because we tipped it in. So be happy. Jump up and down.
That’s something that they’re still learning. They’re very critical of themselves, and I’m going to tell you, each other. So they do some yapping to each other.
But as far as being good teammates and coachable and listening and trying to do what you want, they’ve been great.
Q. In 2010 and 2011, if you needed a basket, Wall or Knight had the ball. In 2012, it kind of depended on the game. Is this a team where there’s a Wall or Knight guy at the end, or is this a 2012 kind of defense?
COACH CALIPARI: Don’t know yet because what will happen is there’s three parts of this. There are guys that I will want to have the ball and they don’t want it. And then there’s guys that really want the ball and I don’t want them to have it. And then there’s guys that want the ball and I want them to have it, and the only way you figure that out is in those close, tough games. It comes down to who made the plays, who made the free throws.
I’ve heard great stuff from the USA Basketball coaches about Julius. When the games on the line, he took the games over. They said it wasn’t close. I’ve heard the same things about Andrew, and what I’m seeing in practice about James, it could be him.
But you’ve also got to be able to make free throws, whoever that is, and you have to know, if they come at you, you have to be a good enough passer that we’re basically playing through you, not saying you take the shot.
Q. Coach, this being the last year of the State Farm Champions Classic, is there anything on the horizon special wise scheduling that you might be able to share with us? And could you talk about the conference, how it’s gotten better, just different teams.
COACH CALIPARI: Boy, if we okay. So the decision being made on the Champions, do we continue? But we’ve also got, we’ll probably announce here in the next two weeks to a month, another, which I would call ridiculous, event that we will be a part of. Again, we have that kind of schedule. They’re adding two more leagues games, as you know.
The league has gotten better. Florida is going to be good. Tennessee is going to be good. You’ve got Mississippi is still going to be good. Missouri’s talking they’re going to be strong again. We’re playing at Auburn again for the ninth straight year. I don’t think Auburn has Auburn played here yet?
Tony’s got those guys, they did a foreign trip, and they’re better. So I may be leaving teams out, but I think it’s going to be the same kind of league it was a year ago.
Q. You mentioned Michael Kidd, and I thought of DeAndre Liggins also, stopper on the perimeter. How important is it finding a guy like that, or can it be done as a team sort of way?
COACH CALIPARI: Do it both, but it’s much easier if one guy can do it. Let me say this. That guy, if he’s the guy and that other guy is trying to attack, you can’t have that guy be your best offensive player, and the reason is they’re going to call fouls. That’s the emphasis.
So if I put my best offensive player and say, you stay in front of this guy, DeAndre and Michael were not the first option for us, even though they both could score and they’ve both done well. Foul trouble was not, you know, that big an issue.
Right now what we’re doing is we’re still fouling on drives. They come at you and go by, you’ve got to give ground. You can’t hit. You know the old hit the guy out of bounds. The officials say the offense created it. They’re not going to be able to say that anymore. If my head and shoulders are by you and there’s contact, it is a foul on the defense every single time, 100 percent of the time.
So you put a guy you need in the game as your stopper, you’re in jeopardy, especially early.
Q. You’ve got a couple guys on the roster in Willie and Marcus (Lee) who are really unique personalities off the court. Have you coached guys like that in the past? Are there maybe some challenges to coaching guys who aren’t just basketball all the time?
COACH CALIPARI: Well, I’ve done this 20 some years now. So I’ve just seen or heard or coached just about any of that.
What you have is these kids all need us in different ways. They’re not cookie cutters. Everyone’s different. I want every kid to express himself as long as it’s not hurting his teammates or hurting himself or his family. My job is to help protect them not only against others outside but also themselves.
But we’re not against Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff because, I hate to tell you, all you old people in here, my son is not watching TV when he gets home. What’s he looking at? The computer. I know, if you’re my age, 46 or 47
[ Laughter ].
You don’t want to hear that, but that’s the fact. So to get these guys to understand that you can use this stuff, if you do it in a positive way and that you’re everything you put out there is out there for the rest of your life. And if a guy doesn’t do it, we’ll counsel him and talk to him. We’ve got a great group of people here that watch everything they send out. There’s nothing they put out that’s not seen.
And we train them, just so you understand. They get training in social media. We bring people in to train them. They show them some of the stuff they put in, and the whole team cracks up. I can’t why would you and we talk to them about it. I think, again, if it you’re trying to prepare these young people for the rest of their lives, that’s all part of it.
Willie is different than Marcus Lee, who’s different than Derek Willis. You know, I’m trying to get those guys to speak a little bit, to talk, come out. Your personality’s in there, come on, throw it, let us see it.
The thing that we’re working on right now is failing fast. Fail fast. In other words, try things, go, attack, so I can correct and you can figure out what’s not going to work and work. We don’t have seven months. We’ve got a brand new team. Fail fast so we can work and move on, and they’ve been doing a pretty good job of that.
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