Media Day 2007 has come and gone. Stacks of pictures were taken. You get your first glimpse of guys like Stuckey, Hayes, and Afflalo wearing the red, white and blue (notice the 50th anniversary patch on the right shoulder?).
Handheld recorders consume the answers that Pistons fans have wanted answered ever since the Pistons left the court for the last time back on the 2nd of June. Usually you expect a lot of cheesey cliche answers from the players about how re-motivated they are how much they’ve worked on their game in the off season. Well, I weeded all through that and took out the good stuff for the PN readers from the annual Q & A session. Here’s some highlights, with a special thanks to Rasheed Wallace, the quote machine. You can also see lots of pics from yesterday by clicking the links.
Sheed on his relationship with Coach Saunders:
“Yeah, Flip and I, we had our little beef, but it wasn’t personal,” Wallace said. “He’s still the coach and that’s respect from my end. It’s not like I am sitting up here saying that I hate the man. It’s not like that. Every player and every coach has their beefs throughout the year. It was nothing new or nothing different.”
It was different enough, though, for president Joe Dumars to intervene. He encouraged Wallace and Saunders to get together over the summer and come to some working relationship. That apparently has happened.
“Definitely,” Wallace said. “If we weren’t (on the same page), then things would really be hectic around here; and they’re not. This is a smooth-sailing ship. Nobody’s trying to jump overboard. Everybody is in it for the long haul. That’s what makes everybody comfortable. Everybody is in it until the end.”
Mcdyess on starting:
“I don’t think I really had a choice, to be honest,” McDyess said, with his usual chuckle. “Joe (Dumars) talked to me about it and said he wanted me to start. There wasn’t anything I could really have said about it. I know they want the five best players on the court to start; they feel that’s the best way to help the team and I feel the same way. If me starting helps get us to where we want to be, then I am willing.”
McDyess, 33, hasn’t started since the 2001-02 season. He admits having some anxiety about it.
“I have to get myself in a different mental state,” McDyess said. “I am so used to coming off the bench. I had pretty much prepared myself that I would be coming off the bench the rest of my career. I guess I am going to have to go out and set the tone instead of watching how the tone is set. I just have to restart my motor.”
Nazr Mohammed lying about how happy he is to be a Pistons:
“It’s a great situation with a great group of guys, a great organization and not a lot of bigs on the roster,” he said. “There aren’t any true centers. There’s not another center in the league who wouldn’t love to be the only center on the roster.”
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