Coach says he will take hard line with McGee, Young and Blatche Flip Saunders was bursting with an offseason’s worth of coaching, lessons and messages to deliver to his Wizards players with a week to go before NBA training camps open on Dec. 9.
Unable to make contact with his players during the lockout, the Wizards coach spent the last six months keeping track of them like everyone else. Yes, he saw Jordan Crawford say that he wanted to be better than Michael Jordan. He also saw the Internet video in which JaVale McGee and Nick Young tried the stunt of eating a spoonful of cinnamon, only to have it snort out of McGee’s nose before he violently coughed it up.
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“All those young guys, the young players, the biggest thing is they’re not young players anymore,” Saunders said. “So they have to show the discipline, maturity, not only on the floor but off the floor. The cinnamon — that thing doesn’t cut it.”
Entering his third season in Washington, Saunders projected a hard line that he intends to take with McGee, Young — whom the team hopes to re-sign — and Andray Blatche, a threesome long pointed to as the source of the Wizards’ inability to grow up.
“We have eight guys 23 and under. That’s pretty young,” Saunders said. “[Blatche] is not one of those guys. He’s a veteran player. When you’ve been in the league six years, you don’t have that crutch anymore of saying, ‘I’m a young guy.’ He’s not. I think he understood that people look up to him, and now it’s a point where he has a responsibility not only to himself but to the team and to his contract.”
Saunders said he believed that John Wall’s barnstorming summer was a product of finding out how difficult the competition was on a nightly basis in the NBA, even for the 2010 draft’s No. 1 overall pick.
“I feel good about where we’re at,” Saunders said. “We’ve made changes that put this team in a situation that at some point is going to be able to go and try to win a championship.”
