On what a ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting looks like with him:
“I would like to think that our players know that we’re going to be truthful and that we’re going to coach them the way that we want them to be coached. We’re going to watch film. We’re not going to hold back. Every game we show them the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think sometimes you’ve got to go deeper than that. Sometimes you revert back to experiences you’ve dealt with in the past. Coaching is an everyday proposition. You can’t ever think you’re there. Instead, you get up every day with the mindset ‘How can we get better?’ Knowing that this is what I do for a living, the guys that I coach want to do it for a living, but they have no idea what goes into that. I do believe if you take days off trying to coach them and help them, it hurts them in the long run. The biggest thing that you can do, and I think our players will tell you, is that I am brutally honest. Sometimes the truth hurts when you see it, but I’m not going to say anything to them that I can’t validate with the tape in terms of their effort and in terms of them not playing the way we need to play. I can point it out to them, but that tape validates it. In the past I’ve said I can arrest them, but the tape charges them. I think as a staff we’re very straight forward with them. The most important thing in life is truth, and I think as long as you’re speaking truth, you’re going to be fine.”
On how to balance wanting to play well now versus wanting to peak at the end of the season:
“We showed yesterday, and just like you would expect in the game the other night against Kansas, we did not execute particularly well to start the game, which I wasn’t surprised because we had two freshmen out there that haven’t been in that situation. If I said it once yesterday, I said it ten times, we’ve got room to get so much better. I don’t think we’re anywhere near peaking right now. It’s still about us getting better. It’s about certain guys still learning the offense, understanding what they need to do, spacing wise. We can get so much better. Defensively the other night I thought we were really good. Where we’ve got to get consistent is offensively. I’m not talking about making shots. When you’re making shots like we did at the start of the game, it made everything look pretty. From a technical standpoint, that’s what it was. We made shots. Once the game settled down, we got back into where we were executing what we wanted to get done.”
NEXT: Rick Barnes media availability continued