Two days after ripping the Washington Wizards after losing to Oklahoma City, head coach Flip Saunders did not back down an inch.
First, he put the team through a three-hour workout that was focused solely on defense.
Afterward, he took on Gilbert Arenas’s notion that the team is trying to shake its “loser mentality,” showing no fear of talking about what Arenas ($16.2 million in 2009-10), Antawn Jamison ($11.6 million) and Caron Butler ($9.8 million) all earn.
“Gil can say that,” said Saunders. “But when you have the money that those three guys are making, you never talk about a loser mentality. You’re making 20 million? You’re getting paid to win. Bottom line. Don’t blame it on the guy that’s making three hundred thousand dollars. This is a league that you get paid based on your production and what your expectations are. It’s up to them to change that mentality.”
“They have to carry us,” Saunders continued. “Now, today Caron Butler had the best practice he’s had since I’ve been here. Today I saw a Caron Butler – we had a talk yesterday or whatever – play how I thought he could play. I told him, maybe I’ve given him too much credit and been soft on him and haven’t driven him enough. That’s not going to happen anymore.”
Saunders kept the pressure on from Tuesday, too, elaborating on what led to his scathing tirade after the Thunder game: “I think it was the constant fact that we continue to make some of the same mistakes, and it just doesn’t seem that when people score on us, that we cared. But yet we care if we don’t get shots.
“I’ve never had a team, in all my time, even if you look at my Detroit teams, it didn’t matter who scored. It didn’t matter who took shots. The crux of the communication always had to do what we were going to do defensively, and that’s one of the reasons that we’ve lost the close games, because we don’t have right now. We haven’t had the confidence, defensively, to think that in the last two minutes, when we need to make two stops in a row to win a game, that we can do that. That’s the point that we’re getting to. I gave 30 games to evaluate and see where it’s at. It got to a point where this is just not going to work that way. There has to be a mental change.”
More shortly from Butler….
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