Coach James

I thought today was a very good day. Our guys were kind of contemplating all night on how fatigued we got in last nights scrimmage, and we really put them through a gut wrenching practice today with defensive work, a lot of conditioning work, a lot of up and down fast break stuff, dribbling, ball handling, passing. We went back really to the basics and got real fundamental, but with a lot of running. They were tired but the effort was tremendous.

Tonight our scrimmages were much better than they were last night. Our execution offensively will continue to get much better every night. Kwame Brown again had another great practice, that’s two in a row. Our guards are really competing out there, putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the ball which we have to have. If we want to really improve on something up over last year, it's our ball pressure to make it more difficult to make teams run their offense.

Jerry Stackhouse asserted himself much more today then he did yesterday. I thought overall Michael Jordan looked very, very crisp. I thought he played very well in the scrimmage tonight which is a great sign because now he's really starting to find his workout rhythm and what he needs to do to get himself ready for our opening game.

It's easy to see who worked extremely hard in the offseason to come in here in great shape. Tyronn Lue and Jared Jeffries are in as good a shape as anybody, and that’s why they are playing so well.

Overall, today was probably an "A-minus."