推 twister527:拜託 翻譯一下@@~ 05/05 09:05
http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/dumars_090504.html
Conducted Thursday, April 30, 2009
Joe Dumars Q&A - Part II
by Keith Langlois
Pistons president Joe Dumars sat down Thursday afternoon with Pistons.com
editor Keith Langlois to discuss the season past and the off-season ahead.
Here’s Part II of the transcript of their conversation.
Keith Langlois: The high point of the season was right after Allen got hurt,
you go into Orlando on a Friday night and win, go into Boston on a Sunday
afternoon, less than 48 hours later, and win. You seemed to be on a roll then
and right after that, that’s when Rip and Rasheed both got hurt again and
you never seemed to recover from that.
Joe Dumars: Like I said, two giant steps forward that weekend and probably
less than a week later, both of those guys were out. So that’s your three
steps back. But it was that all year. Even down to games where I would sit
and watch us play and we’d get a six-, eight-point lead, get two or three
stops and if we come down and score the next two or three times, it’s a
14-point lead. We never did that all year. It always stayed at six or eight,
we didn’t capitalize and the next thing you know we’ve got a tie game on
our hands. That kind of stuff happened all year. After a while you just sit
there and shake your head and say, wow, this is one of those Murphy’s Law
seasons, where whatever could go wrong went wrong. But even in the midst of
all of that, I sat and watched it and never got emotional to the point of,
Oh, my God. It was a short-term window we opened and said we’re going to
open it for a short term but we’re not going to keep it open forever. We’ll
open it and see what happens.
KL: A few years ago when you’d watch Pistons games, even if you’d go into
the fourth quarter down six, eight points, you always felt they’re going to
execute the death out of teams and win going away. This year, it didn’t feel
that way. And I don’t mean to lay this all on Stuckey, but some of it is
having a rookie point guard. I know it’s hard to untangle all of this now,
but how much of his ups and downs this year were the byproduct of the lineup
instability around him.
JD: I think there were several factors that did not allow him to be as
consistent as he could have been. Obviously, the lineup inconsistency.
Obviously, taking over for someone who was as popular with Chauncey was with
the other players on the team. Being a young guy having four other guys all
calling for the ball. Dealing with different personalities. We dropped a ton
on the plate of a young guy who had never started more than five, 10 games.
We dropped a ton on him. But I’d rather drop a ton on him now and let him
just … feet in the fire, both feet in the fire, and learn on the fly. This
is going to be a transition year anyway, so no sense in coddling you and
trying to make you take baby steps. You’ve got to jump out there and do it.
Tough year for a young point guard to get through, but there’s no question
in my mind that he’s going to be better going forward for it.
KL: One thing I found interesting that you said was that he’s going to play
both on the ball and off the ball. Some people took that to mean – and I’m
getting e-mails on this already – that Joe doesn’t think Rodney is a point
guard. What I took from it is he’s still going to be your point guard, but
how much of that was an assessment of Rodney and how much of it was what you
saw from Will Bynum this year and Will giving you the luxury of playing
Rodney off the ball some to get both of them on the floor?
JD: When I make a statement like that, we live in a cynical world. By and
large, people will take whatever negative they can pull out of it, which is
as opposite of what I meant as you can possibly be. The point of the matter
is when you can put two guys on the court like Stuckey and Bynum and have two
ballhandlers and have two guys who can break you down and two guys who can
create shots for others, it makes you better. It’s really more about putting
Bynum out there with him and having two guys break you down off the dribble,
which so many teams have now. That’s what it was about. Stuckey is the point
guard here. He’s the point guard and he’s going to go forward as the point
guard. It definitely wasn’t meant to be that.
KL: I know you were high on Will last summer. When I talked to him in Las
Vegas last summer, he said you had called him personally to invite him to
participate in Summer League. But I’m not sure you saw him having this kind
of impact. When you signed him he was the No. 3 point guard. Is there more to
come with him or did we see everything he’s got?
JD: The reason I was so high on him is because I saw exactly what he could
bring and what he could do. And we are a team that absolutely needs a
change-of-pace motor guy like that, so I thought he would be successful here.
Circumstances allowed him to get on the floor. If not for those
circumstances, Will is the third point guard here all year and you might have
seen little flashes of things but never some of the times you saw him
flat-out win for us. From that standpoint, he surpassed what we thought this
year only because of playing time, not because of ability. I didn’t have any
idea he’d get this much of an opportunity to play this year. But once the
trade went down and things unfolded with Iverson, it opened the door for him.
Once it opened the door for him, I was extremely comfortable with him being
on the floor. As the season went on, when he came in the game, you’d feel
really comfortable when he came in the game and got the ball in his hands.
Especially when Stuckey went through some of his struggles, it was great to
have someone like Will who would step on the floor with extreme confidence
and run the team like he had been doing it for years. That was nice to see
unfold. It really was – it was nice to see unfold.
KL: When you sit down now and game plan for the off-season, trying to put a
roster together, is Will now one of the guys you look at and say, OK, I know I
’ve got this piece in place?
JD: Yeah, we look at him as a part of our core guys now. He’s earned that
with his play, to be a part of the core going forward.
KL: So people will look at your roster and say they’ve got Stuckey at point
guard and Bynum backing him up, they won’t be looking for another point
guard. But if you’re going to be playing them together, there seems like
there’s room for another point guard – and when you look at the draft, at
15 where you’ll be picking, it seems like the strength there will be at
point guard. Is it possible you’ll be looking at that position in the draft?
JD: We have four draft picks. So I wouldn’t say it’s the No. 1 priority for
us, but it is the deepest part of the draft, as you say. But with four draft
picks, two of them being very high second-round picks, we’ll look from there
all the way to 15. But I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily our No. 1 priority.
It can’t be when you have Stuckey and Bynum here already, but the facts of
the matter are there are going to be some good point guards on the board at
15. And if they’re the best player, then you have to look at them.
KL: Another draft question. It’s supposed to be a weak draft. You got
Stuckey at 15 two years ago in a very strong draft. The No. 15 pick comes in
with a first-year salary of $1.5 million, maybe a little more. This summer,
when you’re trying to clear cap space for free-agent pursuits and maybe to
take on salary in trade, is it possible you’d look to trade out of that pick
for the money you could apply elsewhere?
JD: It would really be premature to do that. The only way you could do that
is if you had a set amount of money you were trying to use. We’re not in a
position yet to think about giving away a pick or not using a pick. Where we
are right now, you have to have every asset at your disposal. It wouldn’t
make sense to sell a second-round pick right now. All of them are assets. To
go forward, you may have to use all of them. That time is not right now. That
time is when you get closer to the draft, see how the draft unfolds and then
into free agency a week later. But May 1 or whatever is not the time. We’ve
got six, seven weeks before the draft, so keep all your assets, go into it
with a full deck, and then you start working.
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