Wizards head coach Flip Saunders finally got to gush over No. 1 draft pick John Wall on Friday the way he’s clearly wanted to for the last month, ever since Washington won the NBA Draft Lottery.
Like a proud father – and, in Wall’s case, since he doesn’t have his father anymore, Saunders is certainly expected to be some sort of patriarch-type figure – he interjected during the introductory press conference to make sure Wall’s 3.5 GPA last semester at Kentucky was related to the crowd of media and spectators at Verizon Center, as well as using his trademark line that “point guards aren’t made, they’re sent from heaven,” and a reminder that while he’s worked with a number of outstanding point guards in his coaching career (Chauncey Billups, Stephon Marbury, Terrell Brandon), Wall could be the best of them all.
Still, with the ongoing theme of the day being that perhaps Washington’s overwhelming welcome for the merely 19-year-old might be a little bit over the top, Saunders was asked whether Wall was totally prepared for what was coming his way.
Looking over the Verizon practice court, Saunders said, “At Kentucky, they would’ve opened up Rupp Arena, they would’ve had 20,000 [people].”
“With the internet and everything, these kids are more prepared for these situations than they ever were because they go through it,” said Saunders. “When you’re the number one high school player like he was, he went through the whole thing. Kentucky, because of the whole thing with Cal [John Calipari] getting the job, bringing in all these players, he’s probably more prepared coming into this type of situation, being the number one pick, because of all the hoopla they had, he and Calipari and [DeMarcus] Cousins and all those players at the same time.”
At the same time, now its Flip’s turn to choose how he will approach the coaching of Wall.
“As I told his mom, now I get to throw the iron fist out,” said Saunders. “But usually the players of his caliber, the thing that he has that great players have is he has that extreme competitiveness, and they’re all-around players. Whether you look at [Michael] Jordan, you look at [Kobe] Bryant, LeBron James. They’re all great offensive players but they’re all first team all-league defensive players. That’s where I think he has the ability to be that… But with him, with how hard he plays and just his competitiveness, he’s going to be able to just get by on his defense. That’s how Gary Payton was at the beginning of his career, just able to get by on his defensive ability to do things.”
Like Wizards president Ernie Grunfeld, Saunders put to rest any notion that Wall wasn’t going to be the pick.
“It’s proven if you look at teams that end up having success in the long run, a lot has to do with how their guards play, and we had a lot of leads last year that we lost, a lot of leads in the fourth quarter. In my previous 13 years in the league, we won more five-point games or less than anyone in the league because I had great guard play.”
But one more time, isn’t that asking a lot of a 19-year-old rookie?
“When you step on that court, there’s two things no one asks you for, your ID or your paycheck,” Saunders said. “When you decide to come into the league at 19 or whatever, all the pressure, the competitiveness, it all comes with that, and I think if you try to shelter them too much from that, you’re doing them an injustice. You’re really hurting their development. But as I said, I’ll give them responsibility that they can go and keep on improving. If all of a sudden, they take a step back, then maybe you take away some of that responsibility. That’s how you have to go with it.”
Saunders said the hype around Wall here in Washington was similar but greater to that when he was handed Kevin Garnett straight out of high school. But clearly, the Wizards’ current situation is about much more than Wall and an attempt to redefine the tarnished image of the team and franchise as a whole in the nation’s capital, where all of a sudden there is legitimate superstar competition for sports fans’ attention.
“This city is different,” said Saunders. “This is an event city. Events are big here, and John Wall today, this is an event. What we’re hoping to have happen is that every time we play in this place, it’s an event, and you get the same type of enthusiasm and reception in our game days as we have here. We want to change the culture of people, of how they perceive our team, we want to change the culture of how we play. The thing that Ernie and I, having been here going through the process, having been in Detroit and having success, Minnesota, we had players that were dogs. They were competitive and we didn’t get pushed around a lot. I thought we had a tendency to get pushed around last year, so we said we’re going to bring in guys that are competitive, that are going to go after it, and we brought in guys that have strength.”
