Welcome to the part of my website created to give fans a behind the scenes look at life as a professional basketball player. This page will be constantly updated to reflect my thoughts on the coach, practice, the team, and of course the game itself.

The Halfway Point

The All-Star Break is just around the corner and there’s no better time to look back and see how we’ve progressed at the halfway point.

After starting the season strong, we’ve stumbled a bit and now find ourselves with a narrow lead over the Atlanta Hawks in the Southeast Division. We’ve played a lot better as of late, but there’s still plenty of work to do if we want to return to the NBA Finals. We know we have a great team. The challenge has always been whether or not we can withstand all adversity in order to make it back to the Finals. That’s what great teams do – they weather the storm. There’s no denying that there will be a series of bad bumps on the road. You’re going to lose games and you may lose a series of games in a row. That’s just part of the six-month NBA season.

The reality is, when you fall, you have to learn to get up. When you’re beat down, you have to learn to fight back. If we commit ourselves to being great, we’ll be OK. You can’t be great simply by getting up and being great. You have to work at being great. And you have to work on being a team. If we avail ourselves the opportunity to work hard and to really create a philosophy of “no matter what happens, we’ll persevere,” I think we’ll be fine and we’ll be better from it. We will be able to weather the storm and get to where we need to go. June is a very long time from now. And a lot of things can happen between now and then. It’s all about the mindset. This is where we are, this is what we need to work on (in our case, I think it’s defense) and this is what we have to do to keep fighting. If we can play better defense, fight for rebounds and help Dwight Howard out, we’re going to have a team that’s going to be there in June.

I’m looking forward to the All-Star break and coming back to start the second half of the season strong.

Be back soon ...

- Adonal