Jrue's Training and Leadership
https://www.nola.com/sports/pelicans...e7511c617.html
Great article here by Scott Kushner that I think is a pretty interesting read. For the most part, it largely covers Jrue's offseason work, and while it's interesting to hear from him about his regimen and his schedule, that's not the most interesting part. For me, the most interesting two parts were these moments:
1) ''By late August, he’s planning to spearhead a mini training camp in either New Orleans or L.A., gathering as many teammates as he can onto the same court and mimicking full-court practices.
“We have so many new guys I think we need something like that for chemistry,” Holiday said.''
2) ''“I train to play 48 minutes per game or 48-plus when needed. But, honestly, I haven’t gotten into that with the front office or coaches this year, and I think we are so deep and have so many guards who can contribute that I won’t need to play as much I did last year.
“But if they need me to do even more, I want to make sure I’m ready to do it.”''
These two moments are super interesting to me for two reasons:
1) Jrue's planning on setting up mini-training camps prior to the actual team training camps in order to increase and improve chemistry and get the team playing together in full-court situations early. That's awesome, and it shows a high degree of leadership. Taking the responsibility to organise that kind of thing, and not just letting the team handle it when the time comes, shows a great degree of focus and a real desire to get this time firing on all cylinders as quickly as possible. It's real leadership: taking the bull by the horns and saying, I can run this team and take responsibility for how we play, I don't need the management to do it for me. It's that kind of leadership by example that Redick talks about so much.
2) Jrue basically saying that he's training to be capable of 48 minutes a night regardless of guard depth is super encouraging. That tells me that if he doesn't have to actually play huge minutes, he will be in dynamite condition. This is doubled up by the fact that earlier in the article, he said that ''It’s for more cardio and conditioning and getting the exercise I need in order to play 40 minutes per game, which is really where I need to be when I get to training camp.''. That is, Jrue wants to start training camp in the condition required to play 40 a game. That's ridiculous preparation, and again, it's that kind of standard we love seeing a leader set for a team.
I'm so excited guys. Jrue has me feeling like he's really going to take the reins this year and run this team like a real leader.