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2002 NBA Draft - June 27 Press Conference Coach Brown and Billy King

Sixers Head Coach Larry Brown and General Manager Billy King introduced their three draft picks Sam Clancy, Randy Holcomb and John Salmons to the Philadelphia media.
  • Comments from Sam Clancy, Randy Holcomb and John Salmons

    Coach Brown: Larry (Hughes) played well for us that first year. He was just a little impatient. You know how I felt about him. It could have worked out, I think. He would be flourishing here. Samuel we drafted for the future because we knew basketball wise he was really young. These kids and Speedy and Todd, we felt had the maturity to respect the game and their teammates, being willing improve, doing anything it takes to make a contribution and the fact that they have played in successful programs for four-years makes me think that their transition is going to be a lot easier. To this day, I am wondering where Alvin and Samuel are. With this group, I am pretty confident that if we say you are supposed to be here at a specific time, we want you to do something, it’s going to get done. I told them today, with Speedy you told him once and it was done. You never had to remind him again. I don’t think it is a bad thing to remind young kids, but it sure allows to do the things you want to do, in terms of basketball things, when you don’t have to worry about other issues.

    I mean it is obvious, in our minds. With drafts and trades, you never know. I feel confident with the people we drafted last night that we felt our team get better. We just wrote it on the board last night, position by position. We have competition at positions. If these kids are the type of people I think they are, we are going to be very competitive at every position and at every practice, which is the way it should be here. It will make us better. In talking to them and watching them play, I sense a confidence in them, but also an understanding that it is going to a lot of work on their part and they’re not afraid. Just listen to them talk. I think they have come from good programs and have been taught the right way. I hope that I don’t screw them up.

    Billy King: It was interesting. We started out with different scenarios of what we were going to do. As we were watching the draft, it was pretty quiet. Then as it got closer where we started talking to people, it started heating up. Then it got to the point where I was in the one room making a trade call, and then I’d go back in the other room and draft someone else. Then I’d go back in the other room and make another trade call. So I was back and forth making trade calls. It was exciting. We had like five guys that we wanted; to get three of the five is tremendous.

    Coach Brown: I’ve been on Billy since the end of the season, trying to figure out a way to improve our team. I think I spoke to all of you about getting more athletic, getting more maturity on the bench and we had to have good character. We focused on the draft, but we knew where our limitations would be on the draft. So we focused on ways to improve our club. We had some damage control because some of the past moves we made and wanted to make sure we handled those as well. The last three days have been a roller coaster. We had interesting trade possibilities, things that we never even imagined would be considered. We had some certain things that we wanted to get done in the draft, but we also had some other possibilities to think of as well.

    All of the sudden we started calling about making potential deals for player we like that we saw on the board. One after another, they fell through. Then the Rentzias thing happened and Billy was on the phone with that. We had an opportunity with John and that got kind of hairy. All of the sudden it fell into place, which was an act of God. It was funny, everyone was calling about the 16th pick, which we knew we had already traded. Then we started focusing on the second round real hard because we had Randy, Sam and a couple of other kids down. You start crossing off names and there were other kids going in front of them, so you get more and more excited. San Antonio threw in a second round pick, which we were pretty excited about. If would have know this was going to happen, I would have stayed in Italy. I knew John would be excited because I had heard from a number of people about his feeling towards the Sixers. I was a little nervous about Sam and Randy because why wouldn’t they go in the first round.