David Griffin complete interview January 15,2020

Griff Transcript:

He opens up with the quote that I already transcribed above, so I won't re-do that bit. Questions will be paraphrased, answers will be transcribed close to verbatim.

Question: How frustrating has the speculation been, given the Pelicans history?

Answer: ''Yeah, it's frustrating only from the standpoint of trust. You know, with the player and with our family here internally. Those decisions weren't even reached until this morning when the medical team got together with myself, with Zion, and we sort of arrived at a place where we can tell where we are. So anybody that was guessing before wasn't getting it from anybody that actually knew, so that's really frustrating, because the only people who actually knew anything during the process was the medical team and the player. So for us to have anybody say anything different it certainly didn't come from our side, so it was frustrating, and it obviously wasn't the player either, it was just people throwing darts trying to take a stab at it.''

Question: How did you arrive at the 22nd?

Answer: ''Based on where we're at based on timing, how far away he is, there are some league protocols in place from a return-from-injury, a return-to-play standpoint where you can't just go from 'out' to playing a game [my personal note: weird, cause that happens all the time on injury reports lol] and so as we look at the timeline and the liklihood for when he gets his best work and when we can put him in the best position moving forward we feel like that's the right time. Practice has been complicated, because of our schedule and then you add to it how many injured bodies we've had, we've obviously brought the G League 2 way guys here [...] yesterday the work that Zion did was as good as I've seen, better than he was in the pre-season, so we feel like he'll be a bigger better version of himself going forward but the timing has been difficult.''

Question: What kind of thresholds has Zion had to meet?

Answer: ''So I mean, I think in terms of the tests that we've been asking him to pass and things that we've been judging him on, there's several of them. Almost all of them are entirely objective, so just numbers from when he was healthy previously to now, and in every objective measure his numbers are better frankly. There are a couple of those tests that are a little more subjective and a little more about the eye test, and in those tests there are still things that we feel like since he's taken this long already, we've let him go through the process to the degree we have, and frankly it's not let him; it's put him through the process, if we've taken this much time we want it look right when we let him go.''

Question: Do we know what the minutes restriction will look like when he comes back?

Answer: ''Yeah, we won't do a minutes restriction and this is something that in general terms we sort of philosophically disagree on. It's not about a hard number, it's about what the bursts need to look like, it's what you're measuring him by. So when you return to play from a serious injury it's not going to be a number, it's going to be that he's going to play in bursts and you're going to judge those subjectively in terms of what he looks like.''

Question: What has the atmosphere in the coaching staff/among players/among the FO regarding Zion's return and anticipation for it been like?

Answer: ''I don't think our players had anxiousness at all because they know that when it's time he'll come back, I think there's a great deal of trust in that regard. From a coaching perspective, the anxiousness has been more related to the fact that they had to play a game the other night without 6 of our top 8 rotational players that we thought when we were coming into the season, so it's really complicated from a coaching perspective, so certainly their anxiety level's a little higher, they have to find a way to doctor up what we have and win a game in that particular situation and obviously they did, and I think the team has a great deal of grit and toughness and they know what it takes to win, and we're certainly cultivating more winning habits.''

Question: When Zion returns what will management look like for the rest of the year?

Answer: ''I mean I think from a sustaining health standpoint you're certainly going to teat him differently. His return to play protocol will be such that I don't think we're going to want to play him back to backs for example but you're going to just have to see how it looks. [...] Watching him go about his business will have a great deal of impact day to day. ''

Question: Did you ever consider sitting him for the full year?

Answer: ''No, and he didn't consider it either. The nature of his injury wasn't such that that was called for. You know, other players that have had to make that determination, in almost every case they had a much more significant surgery. Blake Griffin fractured a kneecap: that's a different issue. Zion knew from the very beginning that he was going to play and he's wanted to play; he's told you that he hasn't been overly happy with me that he hasn't played yet. So it was never a thought that he wasn't going to play.''

Question: After 41 games how do you evaluate the team as a whole?

Answer: ''I don't know that we know enough to know that. It would be disingenuous to say that I know what we are. Frankly a lot of the pieces that we have are going to look better in the presence of Zion, we built the team knowing what it was going to look like in that way and the absence of Derrick Favors for what basically amounted to a month of games you could see that we were just searching, so coming down the stretch where we're healthier, playing against a schedule that's not quite as difficult, for our coaches to have to field a team with the most games lost due to injury and the toughest schedule against at one point, that's tough. We just need to find out what we're capable of being. I think what's most exciting about our group is that you can tell we've got a lot of really good young talent, we've got veterans that love being with that young talent and we have a group that really likes each other. In the times when we weren't playing well, we didn't fracture, and I think that makes us optimistic that when we're healthy we can be pretty good.''

Question: It's interesting you bring up Blake: with Blake, they said he had to get leaner but were worried about him losing his power. How does Zion keep that power?

Answer: ''Yeah so I don't think in the Blake case it was necessarily a leaner situation that makes him share anything with Zion, it's the amount of torque they generate, they're so big and strong and explosive that they just generate more torque than other people. It's physics. So in terms of the similarities there are some but from our standpoint the thing that made it stand out and the reason I mentioned Blake is simply that, it's not really about the lean part. It's about how do you give a guy who manifests muscle as fast as he does to give him the power he needs.''

Question: One of the benefits of being out so long is that it gives time to work on things outside the knee. What's been going on with his mechanics?

Answer: ''Yeah so, we've already talked about the concept of 'teaching him how to walk again', which is sort of preposterous, but really it's just the whole kinetic chain. You're addressing everything you're addressing ankle flexion, then knees, then hips, then back, and everything else and I think what's happened is that his overall kinetic chain is in a much better position, and I think he's more flexible and when you make someone more flexible you have to give them the strength to control that flexibility and it's been a dance, it has been, but he's now able to do some things physically that he wasn't able to do before, particularly because of the flexion in his ankles and his hips.''

Question: Can you understand why fans are a little confused when you originally said 6-8 weeks, then you said no setbacks, and now we're talking 13 weeks plus?

Answer: ''Yeah, I get that, sure, and I'm appreciative of that, but at the same time my job isn't to stick to the initial timeline it's to put him in the best position to succeed, and I get the frustration of it but I'd also hope that we're at a trust level right now where we're going to do the right thing for the kid long term and that's what we made the determination to do.''

Posting the full transcript in here too, for anyone who catches this thread rather than the other.