Second year head coach Will Hardy feels like he’s grown a lot with the Utah Jazz from last season to now.
(via Antonio Ray Harvey):
“I think last year we were able to grow to a place of really blunt honesty. I think with a lot of the players on our team I’ve felt comfortable from the very first day delivering that blunt honesty where they understand that it’s coming from a place of me trying to help them, me wanting to try to put them in the best situation possible, and it’s not personal at all. I think if you don’t have the foundation of a relationship, it’s hard to give people that really, really brutal honesty at times because you don’t know where it’s coming, you don’t know what their intentions are. You can misunderstand people’s tone of voice, personality. So I think it’s just played out that early in camp we’ve been able to be far more honest with each other than last year where we were trying to feel each out and they were trying to understand my personality.
“I think they all know now that I’m a very sarcastic person. There’s times I’m just joking with them to try to lighten the mood, where last year early on if I had been that way, they may have taken a lot of things I said seriously. So it’s comforting when you feel like you can be honest with people, and they aren’t taking things the wrong way. I think early on last year I was always very concerned and probably overthinking how I said things to them, because I never wanted anything to be taken the wrong way as we were trying to build the trust in those relationships.”
