AJC.com: Cunningham: Rick Sund Q&A

Michael Cunningham asked Rick Sund some relevant questions. Sund responded with a mix of defensiveness:

Q. Do you think this core group has peaked?

No.

Q. How can it be better?

In some ways it might be a little bit like Dallas, although we were younger than Dallas. Dallas went three straight years with disappointing playoffs and eliminated in the first round and I think that prompted Cuban the other day to grab the mic and say, ‘For all you people that didn’t believe in us . . . ‘ Because they kept their core group together including Kidd and Nowitzki and Marion and they got criticized for that quite a bit. And they got beat pretty much embarrassingly, by their standards, in the last three years. I think we have learned along the way. We will look at the possibility of making our team better. We do every year. We’ve made two major trades the last two years and we will continue to look and see if there is something that makes us better.

Q. You look at Dallas, they did make a trade that helped them so...

Yeah, well, you asked me about the core group and that’s what I’m responding to. The core group of our players have, I think, improved every single year. I’ve had that question every year, even the year I got here: Can this core group get even better? And they have, I think, in terms of ultimately the playoffs.

Q. So you are not inclined to break it up?

I didn’t say that. I said we will continue to look. Your question was, ‘Can this core be competitive again?’ I think we were pretty competitive in the playoffs. I think we can continue to do it but I think we will look, like we do every year, to see if we can do something to make our club better.

dismissiveness:

Q. Larry’s offense didn’t go the way he planned as far as getting team to play that style all the time. Do you still think this...

I don’t know. You have got to ask that question to Larry.

and a reinforcement of the organization's central delusion:

Q. Joe got the contract and he had his worst year since he’s been here. He’s getting older, he had the injury, so are you concerned...

Well, I don’t worry about the old. When I am seeing Jason Kidd and Nowitzki and the Wades and all these people in their 30s, that doesn’t bother me.

At this point, I genuinely don't care what Rick Sund says, only what he does (and even then with a number of caveats concerning the degree of authority he has in making basketball-related decisions). Hence the lack of further analysis in this space.