Alvin Gentry Media Availability – July 17, 2020
On Jrue and Lauren Holiday’s donation and how meaningful the contribution is:
“Well, I talked about it last night. I think the thing that I love about Jrue and Lauren and really the whole Holiday family is that they’re so embedded in the community and they’re so embedded in causes that I thought it was an unbelievable thing that they would do…to all of a sudden, give his complete salary that he’s going to be making down here, in a situation that’s going to help so many people. It’s going to help so many people, and I think that’s what they’re all about. If you know anything about Lauren Holiday, if you’ve been around her at all, you know how great a person she is and everything that they’ve been through and all of this, and yet to still the one thing for them is that they want to make sure that everybody else has opportunities. I thought it was a great gesture. I thought it was something that they talked about between themselves as a family, and they came up with this and I think it’s an amazing thing.”
On adjusting to the potential absence of Zion Williamson and if those adjustments are needed more offensively or defensively:
“Well, guys, I think you have to understand one thing: we played 44 games without him, and so it wasn’t so much of an adjustment, we just went back to some of the things that we were doing before he was able to play. But it’s not that great of an adjustment from the standpoint of the number of games that we played without him. Obviously, we’d like to have him here and we hoped he was here, but he’s not, so we just practice and we make adjustments accordingly, but there’s not any big adjustments we have to make from the standpoint of our guys have a drawn idea of how to play without him and as I said yesterday, at one stretch we had a really good run. We won 12 out of 16 games that he wasn’t playing in because he wasn’t physically able to play in those games at that time. We’re just going to continue on. Like I said, the one thing that we have is that we have depth. I mean, obviously, you’d like to have him here, but we have depth, and we always talk about the next man stepping up and this is going to be an opportunity for some guys to step up and play some minutes and do a good job for us.”
On if playing in the bubble reminds him of coaching college basketball:
“It’s the biggest and best AAU tournament ever, okay? It does. Obviously, it’s a different feel. No one has ever done this in the NBA, in the history of the league, so it’s new to every single person here. I will say this about the NBA, every day I’m here you realize how much time and effort they put into making this thing work. The facilities have been really good. The basketball facilities have been phenomenal because we’re mainly practicing every day on NBA courts that were flown in. The food has been good. Just the effort to put this whole thing together, it had to take a lot, a lot of man-hours and I think it’s run very smoothly up until this point. So kudos to the NBA for being able to pull this off, and kudos to the players because I think they tried to make the adjustments necessary to try to make this work and it’s been something that…it’s been different from the standpoint of, like I said, no one has ever experienced this or tried to undertake this. It’s a really good thing, and I think next week we start playing the scrimmage games and the week after that we’re going to start playing games, and I think the players will even be locked in that much more.”
On if the speed and tempo have picked up during the last couple days of practice:
“Yeah, I think so. I think we play at a great tempo. I would say that today, we struggled a little bit. Legs a little bit tired even after having a day and a half off, almost two days off. That usually happens when you’re in an environment like this and going through those situations. I think our guys are really trying,
and we’re trying to ramp it up to get basketball legs under us. We’re going to be okay with that. Today really was the first day we had even a marginal practice. All the other practices have been really, really good and very focused and very physical. We’ll get back tomorrow. We practice in the afternoon, and I think I would prefer the earlier afternoon practices than the practices this late.”
On if Brandon Ingram will play the power forward position in the scrimmages if Zion Williamson is unable to play:
“Well, I think we’ll use him there some. I don’t know how much. We’re going to experiment with some other situations because I think the physicality sometimes of that position when you try to play him 35-38 minutes, it’s a little much. So we’re going to look at some things, obviously, during these scrimmages as to how we can fill the void if Zion is not back and if he’s not playing, but hopefully that won’t be the case. As I said, we’ll use him there some, but we will also use some other guys at that position.”
