Press Conference Quotes - August 6th

King

Brown

Opening statement Billy King
I am here to make an announcement that we have traded Dikembe Mutombo to New Jersey for Keith Van Horn and Todd MacCulloch. First, I want to say, as I talked to Dikembe, I wanted to thank him for what he did for us. I think he was a big part of us going to the Finals. I told Dikembe, this is something that wasn’t easy, but it is something we felt we needed to do. Keith gives us a big forward that can play three and four as well gives us some offense. He’s a guy who can shoot the ball from the outside and is very versatile. Todd as you all know can play center. His one year sabbatical in New Jersey is over. It was a difficult trade, but one I think will make us a better ball club.

Opening statement Larry Brown
I would like to reiterate what you said about Dikembe. I don’t think there was any way we would have gone to the Finals without him. He was a great person to work with, a great teammate and someone we will all miss. He’s going to a team that has a chance to win a championship. They went to the Finals last year. I think we get two assets back that are really good young players that have a chance to get better. Hopefully, the trade will help both teams.

Are the Sixers in the category of winning a championship now?
Larry Brown: I think we have improved with the things we have done so far. I think just getting healthy is going to help us. I think we have added a number of players that certainly is going to make us better. Our bench last year was put under a lot of pressure with the injuries we had. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think our bench was nearly as good as we needed it to be.

On the drastic alterations for the second year in-a-row?
Larry Brown: We had some things that were beyond our control last year. We could not re-sign Todd, and we did not know that Matt Geiger was going to retire. If we had kept Matt Geiger and were able to keep George (Lynch), we would have mostly kept the nucleolus of our ball club. There were a lot of situations where we could not keep the team together.