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Q. I’ve finally managed to carve out some time to watch basketball…
A. Nice.
Q. One thing about the current basketball spread is that if you have multiple playmaking threats open, it opens things up for more feints, tricky plays, and just for a depth of strategy. [...] With TL, do you feel like this lineup is harder to counterstrat and has more depth of strategy available to it than it used to?
A. I think that’s the hope. That’s what we wanted to do when we were approaching this offseason. We wanted to be an incredibly dynamic team. Yeah, I think there are analogies like that in the NBA, but it’s still going to be a challenging balance to make sure we’re identifying the right things. Because you see the same thing in the NBA roster construction, like if you have too many ball-dominant players, they’re not actually distracting threats from anyone.
It would help if you had the right mix of ball-dominant players, shooters, pick-and-roll guy, 3-and-D. It would help if you had all those different combinations. Sometimes putting together superstars, if the superstars don’t also have those supportive qualities, it isn’t going to work.
So I think last split, it was simpler in the [sense of] “hey, this is probably going to be our best chance to win.” We’re still figuring that out with us because we have such dynamic players. I mean, you even got to see (Nicolaj) Jensen play Galio today, which is a champion he hasn’t really played since his C9 days because we’ve played a lot of carry tops super early on. That doesn’t mean we can’t play a defensive topside with a control mage mid and, you know, play for bot prio[rity] or something like we did last split.
I guess I’m talking super generally, but yes, we should be very versatile, but that isn’t just because everyone’s a star it’s because a lot of these guys will need to excel on more supportive stuff when the comp calls for it. Cause you can’t have carries everywhere.
Q. Your first year is done now. It felt like a ‘feeling it out’ year. [...] Now this feels a lot more like it’s your team - and also Jensen’s and ownership and things like that too. Has that changed your experience as a head coach this year?
A. Yeah, I mean at least so far during the season. I’ve had a lot more of a hand in really constructing the coaching staff that I’ll be working with, and I have more confidence in the decisions that I’ll be making.
I also do wanna shout out to Kold (Jonas Anderson). Since we’ve been scrimming on January 4th, even before that, Kold has just been really great with his knowledge of the game, his help with the draft, and his help with the review. So we’re really tag-teaming a lot of this stuff, but yes, it feels a lot better knowing that we have more control and agency in what we do.
