Off-Season Quotage

One. Frank Layden on Gordon Hayward’s free agency and how he’d pitch Utah to Hayward: I would say look at the success you’ve had here…You know, this is an easy place for you to live. You know your way around. It’s easy to get to the airport. It’s easy to get to practice. We’re changing the practice facilities. You’re the main man.

You know, we might say that [Rudy] Gobert is the one that we need the most, but it’s you. You are that [Karl] Malone, that [John] Stockton, that guy that we’ve got to have. This is your team. Now you go somewhere else, maybe it isn’t quite the same. Maybe you go to, you know, you go to Boston and the people are more interested in the little guy there, who knows? But I would try to convince him that he knows what he has here. …

By the way, remember a couple years ago when the Jazz stepped up and they paid you the maximum? I mean, I don’t think anybody at that time — I didn’t think he was worth it. I think the Jazz, for one of the few times in their history, actually went overboard. And they paid this guy all this money, giving him all that thing, and this was a team that couldn’t make the playoffs!

So I think does he owe something back to the Jazz? I think he does. Does he owe something back to these wonderful fans? I think he does. If he goes somewhere else, is he going to be, get the same coaching or get the same attention and the press and everything else that he gets here, and the comfort of being here? I don’t think so.

So I think it would be in his best — it would be my suggestion, and in his best interests, to stay here and make this a home, and, just as some of the other great Jazz players have. And I’m thinking of, you know, whether it was Malone and Stockton — and by the way, even in the last year, it was a mistake letting Malone get out of here and we haven’t been the same since…

All these guys who made great careers and even stayed here after, couple of them stayed here after and have businesses here. When you think of the investments that John Stockton and Karl Malone have made here, and certainly Thurl Bailey and Big Mark Eaton.

Yeah, I think he could fall into that realm. He may. If he’s selfish, he may go somewhere else and it may not be quite what he thinks of this or what it’s like…I’ll tell you one thing. The Celtics is a tougher team to play for than the, certainly than the Jazz are. Those fans will eat him alive if he didn’t come through and they paid him all that money. They’d eat him alive.

Two. Layden on where the Jazz need improvement if Hayward can’t take them to the next level: Well, I think you gotta do it in slow steps. They’re gonna be better just the fact that they’re gonna be a year older, and a year more experienced and that they know what it takes to get to the playoffs. And I think we also realize that this year that they did have a lot of missed games…

I think what you gotta do is sustain who you are, all right, and I think that, you know, and hope that you have — I think when [George] Hill played — I’ll give you an example: When Hill played, our point guard, when he played, this was a team that was much better than anything else we could possibly do.

Now, when Hill got hurt, maybe we should’ve played the Australian kid [Dante Exum] all the time and just live let him do his mistakes, and maybe by the end of the season he would’ve been a much better player. But however they chose not to do that, and they, the other kid is a good backup, the [Raul] Neto kid or whatever his name is.

But you know, I think that these, the key position is always down the middle. I think not only do they, hei–you can’t get enough big guys. So I would try to get another big veteran player up front, and then I would like to see us, you know, and we can get rid of that kid from California [Jeff Withey] or something else. Our secondary is a little bit soft.

And then I think what we gotta do is, we gotta look for the idea, we can’t count on what’s his name, oh, the guy, [Joe] Johnson, you know, to come ba–come through and give us a few minutes here and there though he’s gonna be very, very good. I think we need another veteran forward and I think if, you know, common sense says can we get, we gotta get a healthy Hill, make sure he’s here. If he’s not, then we’ve got to get another point guard.

Three. Dennis Lindsey, asked if he’d be comfortable with the Jazz’s point guard rotation if George Hill and Shelvin Mack leave: I think it goes without saying that somewhere in the point guard queue that we have to have some experience. And while Dante is, he’s all we th–all the way back from a health standpoint and now he has to develop his skills and develop experience.

And Raul’s still 24, and we have great hopes and ambitions for Raul Neto as well. He’s a great fit for us on and off the court. And then, but, do we carry four point guards like we did last year?…I think we needed all four at various times in the year, especially given what’s happened to us the last two years with all the injuries.

Four. Lindsey on whether Dante Exum is a starting point guard or a 3&D guy in the NBA: It’s funny. I think he has to use his speed, this point guard speed that he has when he’s more at the wing, and he’s gotta use that better going forward. And a lot of that is, is developing the skoo–skills to allow his speed to come out. And then when he’s playing a guard position, he needs to use the unique size — the wing size, if you will — more as a guard…

He has to develop the skills to match his size, and match his speed. We can all see that. There’s a little bit of a duh factor, and that just takes time. He’s 21 and a half right now, or a little bit older than that. Turns 22 in July, so he’s a college-age senior, and we lost a season. So, what we impressed upon Dante is, is his urgency has to match mine and Quin [Snyder]’s urgency for him. I–this plan has to be minute by minute this summer. …

Dante’s gonna have to do the work, and we’ll see where it fits within the team concept.

Five. Dennis Lindsey, Unintentional Dirty Quote Machine:
** A lot of what we wanna to do can’t be consummated until early July.
** Many times, you’ll get several teams that wanna do something and be active. They just can’t find anything that intrigues them enough to pull the trigger. So, that one’s typically been hard for me.
** We have great size, length, across the board, positionally. We’ve been intentional there. Not that we wouldn’t take a smaller, talented player with the right characteristics, but one thing that I think you could point to is our unique size. Derrick has that. Rudy has that. Gordon, Joe Ingles, Joe Johnson, Dante Exum, George Hill. We’re big. And that’s something that we felt like if we were big and/or long, that we could build a defense, and Rudy’s both of those adjectives.
** We want PHDs, and it has nothing to do with degrees.

Six. Quin Snyder’s journey from Missouri to Austin: I didn’t anticipate getting back into coaching [after Missouri]. I didn’t have a plan, and that was part of it. And I think that was good, because, you know, I ended up having some changes in my personal life, and suddenly found myself really with an open book. You know, a blank slate.

And, you know, what do you want to do? I don’t know. Where do you want to do it? I don’t know. Well, if you get to that point, it doesn’t matter. Like, you can’t go wrong, right? You don’t know what you want to do and you don’t know where you want to do it, well, how about, you know, the Austin in the D-League?

So, it was empowering that you had that sense of possibility in that sen–to me, that was, the biggest thing for me that you come to is, the thing you can control is your own mindset and how you want to approach something, and you know, I got in a place where I liked what I was doing and put my head down and that was my focus and I didn’t really worry about any of that other stuff that I’d spent a lot of time trying to control or worry about…

Before I got to Missouri, I basically spent my adult life at Duke, and, from 18 to 32. I mean, that’s, I played there, you know, and then gone to grad school there and didn’t think I was gonna coach, and then started coaching and had an opportunity but didn’t have — there’s some things that, you know, experientially that you can think you know, you could maybe know intellectually or rationally, but until you’ve lived through certain things, there’s a level of knowledge and of understanding, whether it’s the profession or even on a personal level, that you just don’t have. Life experience is the only way to acquire some of those things, and whether we call them lessons or adversity or whatever the case may be.

So, one of the things for me before I got to Austin, and I remember, you know, I had multiple conversations with R.C., which is one of the reasons I ended up in Austin. R.C. Buford, that is, who I’ve known, you know, since I was a teenager. He recruited me when I was, he was at Kansas…He [was] someone that I would talk to during that time, ’cause I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to keep doing, and in that sense, for me going to Austin — I didn’t go back to coaching with a complete, kind of clarity that this is what I wanted to do.

I went back to make sure that if I didn’t want to do it, I was comfortable I knew that, and it wasn’t as simple as just, hey, diving in. You know, I was definitely kind of feeling the waters out, and I was forthright with that about, with myself, and I think kind of let’s see how this goes…It was an opportunity to really, you know, down to the nuts and bolts, is this what you like doing, and what I began to kind of find out is this is something I’m really lucky. I’ve got something I like doing. I love the teaching part of it. I like the competition.

The long bus rides and the early flights and the hundred people in the audience in the stands, and none of that really had an impact on me whatsoever because I was doing something that I had found out that I really like to doing. And you lose sight of that. Sometimes there’s so many other things externally, particularly in college, you know, with the other responsibilities. The other things that you’re accountable for, were very different.

In this case, it was just coaching…I got to be a head coach and to screw up a timeout situation and to be hard on myself and fail, so to speak, and learn from it, and have the support of a group and a team…But yeah, I was stripped down to the point where it was raw.

You know, it was, it made sense to me that this is where I wanted to be, and I wasn’t, I got to a point where I was, frankly I didn’t really care if I was gonna be in the NBA or not. I found something I liked doing, and day-to-day life was good. You know, I met my wife. And everything on that level, fundamentally for me, was in a good place and that made me, you know, gave me the opportunity to be better at what I did.