 I wanted to be a head coach, so I said, you know what, I'm going to go back to the minor leagues, even though I've been a two-time NBA head coach. I don't need to stay at the Ritz Carlton. I don't need to eat shrimp and lobster on the team plane. I'm cool riding a bus from Reno to Bakersfield with my team. I'm cool taking a 12-hour bus ride. I'm fine staying in the days in. I just want to coach basketball. You know, for me managing stress, I think there's like stress in season and stress out of season, so the stress in season is very, very selfishly. I'm going to work out for two hours every day, and it's non-negotiable. Doesn't matter if I have a million meetings. You know, I'm not trying to beat anyone in the office. I'm going to work out, after I wake up, I'm going to go work out every single day. I'm going to do an hour cardio where I listen to podcasts, and then I'm going to do an hour, you know, lift. Actually, it's an hour listening while I lift weights, and then it's an hour of reading when I'm doing my cardio vascular. So for me, it's just a part of my routine that never changes. It's seven days a week. If it's a travel day, I don't wake up and say, I'm tired. I'm going to take off today. I just don't take off. I haven't taken off for, I don't know how many, you know, probably 20 years. Yeah, even in the middle of the pandemic, when there was no health clubs, I set up a health club in my garage, created my own little routine. And then off season, like, you know, I think that our game, both professionally in the NBA and our game in college, has evolved to where it's a, it's kind of a 12 month, you know, gig. I mean, in the NBA, it goes from the season to the playoffs to free agent prep to draft prep to the draft to the summer league. And so how do you, you got to get away, you know, and in college, it's, you know, 12 months a year of recruiting. And so for me, it's like, like I know, if I only had five days to live where I would go, I would go to San Diego. I'd want to eat a burrito every single day for lunch. Carnia saw a burrito and I want to ride the boardwalk twice a day. And I'd want to jump in the ocean two or three times a day. So in the off season, again, selfishly, even when I bring my family to San Diego, I'm going to go on, you know, two or three bike rides along the boardwalk. And they can join me for a carnia saw a burrito with guacamole or not, but I'm going to do it every day for lunch. When I, when I leave the office, I try to tell everybody, like, get out of here, the office is closed. You know, I don't want, I don't want guys staying in the office and doing film. And, you know, I think every coach has his own, you know, system or style, like my dad, interestingly enough, he never went into the office at South Alabama when he was a college coach. I don't know how he did it. But he had a really quick turnaround and made the NCA tournament in year two, but he did it without ever going in the office. He just was a big believer that he was going to, you know, make his recruiting calls from his house or while he was working out or whatever. You know, but I do think everybody's got their own, you know, way of doing things. And when I've worked for different people, it's kind of been the same thing, you know, like Lon Kruger, when I worked for Coach Kruger, I was home every day to pick up my sons from school when the bus pulled up. And with Coach Fertello, you know, we worked a little bit longer hours and we would go to dinner together as a staff together, even when it was a home game. Or, you know, we weren't traveling, I should say. So I think everybody's got their own system and their own style, you know, and how they're going to deal with staff and hours and off hours. But I do certainly think that just as you need your players to get a mental break, you also need your staff to mentally get a break. Probably surprisingly, Alan, no. You know, and I think it's because I saw my dad, my dad was like, at almost every dinner that I had growing up, whether he was coaching at University of Minnesota or whether he was coaching at Minnesota Timberwolves, like he was a workaholic, but he was a workaholic on his own time. But I will say the physical aspect, you know, when my dad was in the Mayo Clinic, his last 10 days of his life, he did look at me and he told me, let me tell you the most important coaching lesson I can tell you, you're going to have to stay in shape because you're going to have to demonstrate to your team. And you need to retire when you can no longer demonstrate. Because, you know, so that aspect, you know, and I saw my dad work out every day like a maniac. He was a physical fitness, you know, crazy man. And then I saw him spend summers, regardless of where he was coaching collegiately or the NBA, I saw him spend almost his entire summer for three months in Sarasota, Florida on the beach. So I got to see that work balance from a guy that on the outside was perceived as being a workaholic and a guy that was consumed by basketball, which he was, but he did have another side to him as well. But I do think that the physical conditioning stuff, it was one, the lesson for my dad. And then when I coached the Dominican Republic and Venezuelan national team, and you know, only five or six of my guys spoke the same language as me, demonstration, I learned really, really the importance of it, you know, under showing players footwork, you got to get out there, you got to do it yourself. If the feet are supposed to be at a certain angle, defending pick and rolls, you've got to, you've got to go out there, demonstrate, show it. You know, so I think there is sweat equity when you can get, you know, and I wish I worked, I wish I did more individual work with players, pre-practice and post-practice. I come into the office every day and say I'm going to do it. But then I get tied up and walk down to practice 15 minutes before instead of going down there 30 minutes before. And I wish I had more sweat, sweat equity, which I did do as a younger coach. Yeah, I mean, like to me, I tell our staff all the time, like I have, I have like player ADD, coaching ADD, like I want something new every day at practice. And, and I've never done it before, but like we're trying to teach lateral foot speed defensively by using tapes of video clips of tennis players going side line to the sideline, where when we talk about precision on our spacing and cutting, we're showing wide receiver clips and the precision of a wide receiver planting a foot and doing a down and out or a down and in or a hook pattern. So I've tried, I've used other sports a lot, but I've never used other sports video clips showing short stops in a defensive stance before the pitch is thrown off the pitchers mound and then showing short stops reaction to a ball coming off a bat at an incredible speed. So reaction time, precision on cutting, lateral quickness or lateral foot speed, jump ball, I've never done this before at all. But because of the pandemic, I watched maybe a little bit more NHL hockey and I'm watching the face off and I'm thinking, gosh, that's like a jump ball circle. Yeah. So how are we going to take video clips of a hockey center ice and incorporate into maybe some jump ball plays where we try to score and look at our spacing right out of the jump ball that that hockey does on their face offs. I think one of the things is like we have a think tank every day. And most of the time, I don't bring in our three assistant coaches. I bring in all the younger guys on staff. Most of the guys are under the age of 35. And I'll just throw out an idea like whether it'd be social media. And I'll just want them to come up with like who in this room can come up with five creative ideas off this one thought process. And so I think like every single day, giving your team something that they've never known as a coaching staff coming up with new terminology. For instance, today I walked in after watching major league baseball playoff game between the Dodgers and Padres and I started thinking about different pitches that a pitcher throws. So a pitcher comes in with the curve ball, a fork ball, a fastball. And so I started thinking, wow, that's the same thing we do with our defense. Instead of trying to throw the hitter off, we're trying to throw the offense off with different concepts defensively. And so I might today show a change up a fastball and a fork ball and a knuckleball and ask our team what do you think this means. And they're not going to probably correlate it to our defense. And then I'm going to say, Hey, this is what we're trying to do when we hard show on the pick and roll defense. It's like a curveball. And then when we switch, it might be, you know, a knuckleball and so on and so forth to try to get them to think of how different our defensive coverages are because we all know a fastball is a lot different than a knuckleball to a hitter's eyes. So we want that same parallelization when a batter's up there and gets paralyzed by a pitch. We want that same jolt of energy with our defensive concepts to the offense. So we just put out a graphic. My son did it. I think 19 different stops as a 55 year old coach. I'm going to start with growing up. Obviously, my dad had a huge effect. Best friend, Idle wanted to walk in his footsteps. But my mom, I really don't talk about her enough when I'm, you know, either doing an interview or a podcast or whatever. So my mom's background is her family was in the Pepsi business. And when I first started coaching, I would often early on in my coaching journey have have a new opportunity because I was known as a rising young X and O coach who was really intense. And so my mom said when I was working for a certain coach, she said, have you learned his system? And I said yes. And she goes, move on, go learn from someone else. And I think most people's advice to young coaches is, you know, stay where you are, keep working. My mom was always as soon as you've learned what you need to learn, move on. And then my mom also, I think because of the Pepsi plant business, the promotion aspect of my life, because I've heard how her family promoted Pepsi Cola. And so I think that I've kind of evolved as I've gotten older and use some of the lessons I heard at the dinner table from my mom and her father and her brother who all own Pepsi plant. So as far as the evolving the career, Alan, if anyone studied my dad's career and my career, it is so it's so eerie that it's incredible. Yeah, weaving in and out from college to an NBA assistant to an NBA head coach back to college to the minor leagues. So I would say my my ego never got in the way. Nice. And so I did want to reinvent or recreate who I was after I got fired from Sacramento Kings. I had two opportunities, a head coach at the NBA level, Sacramento and Golden State. I had done enough research that you don't usually get a third chance unless you go back and you're an assistant for four to five years. And I did not want to do that. I wanted to be a head coach. So I said, a head coach. So I said, you know what, I'm going to go back to the minor leagues, even though I've been a two time NBA head coach, I don't need to stay at the Ritz Carlton. I don't need to eat shrimp and lobster on the team plane. I'm cool riding a bus from Reno to Bakersfield with my team. I'm cool taking a 12 hour bus ride. I'm fine staying in the days in. I just want to coach basketball. So after getting fired from the Kings, I did the Dominican Republic. We had practices basically outside or in practice gyms that had no roof. And you know, if it was windy out, it would affect your jump shot. There might be cockroaches going across the floor before we practiced. And Venezuela, we dealt with some, you know, circumstances that aren't what you'd see in the NBA. But then when I didn't get that call up, after doing two national team head coaching after the Reno D League of having great teams and having a lot of call ups from Jeremy Lin to Hassan White side to Steve Novak to Jeremy Lin and then going to the Lakers G League team and shattering all G League records, I decided those four stints did not get me back as a head coach that I was going to go to college. And I knew what I didn't know. So it was a very humbling experience to be an assistant coach at the collegiate level and not the top assistant either. Other people having the associate head coach title kind of starting at the very bottom third assistant coach. And I did that. And you know, because of that, I kind of, you know, got my way back to a head job at Nevada. And then I also think this, it's not just with me, Alan, it's not just a reinvention or whatever word you want to use. From a coaching standpoint, I've also completely changed perceptually. I went from an old school thought people thought even when I was 35 or 37 when I was coaching the Warriors, he's old school. He's intense. He doesn't have fun. He's really serious. He's extremely demanding. Well, now we have a lot of young coaches in college basketball that think that I'm nothing but a guy that does stuff on social media. I'm putting on a game uniform and doing recruiting pictures where the recruits Alan Iverson and I'm Tai Lu and the recruits stepping over me after a big shot. Or I'm getting dunked on by Vince Carter and it's a recruit. And I'm standing there in a uniform with a headband on and two sweat bands on my wrists. You know, of late, I've been going to practice in either a major league baseball, mask and shirt NFL could be major league soccer, it could be a soccer or I put on an Australian pro basketball team shirt the other day and mask. And so now there's people in our conference assistant coaches that are young that basically think I'm not a coach but a marketer. So I went from too serious as a young coach to now an older coach who people question, is this guy an X and O guy or is this guy just a clown on social media? And I actually get a kick out of it because I'm a much better coach now than I was at a younger age when I was labeled an X and O guy and I had incredible assistant coaches from David Fisdale to Scotty Brooks to Jim Boylan. All guys that went on to become NBA head coaches and those guys would talk about man after timeouts. I've never seen someone come up with wrinkles and so on and so forth. Now I'm coaching in college and like I mentioned people are thinking that during the game I'm probably trying to figure out what I'm going to do on Twitter rather than come up with the side out of bounds or a baseline out scheme which couldn't be further from the truth. I think because I was around an incredible example you know with my dad because again when I was growing up you know my father was the head coach at the University of Minnesota, head coach of the San Diego sales in the ABA, head coach of the Virginia Squires in the NBA and then all of a sudden I go to college and he was you know like I've mentioned the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers when I was in high school and then all of a sudden I go to college and my dad is coaching the Tampa Bay thrillers in the CBA and I'm flying to go watch the Tampa Bay thrillers and I'm used to my dad coaching in front of 19,000 people at Williams Arena. Oh and by the way the hockey arena next door has got another 5,000 people because they can't fit into Williams Arena on game night and the game's being televised on closed circuit TV to my dad coaching in the Boston Garden while he's coaching the Cavs or Madison Square Garden against the Knicks. Then I go to college and I say I'm going to go watch my dad coach the Tampa Bay thrillers and there's 20 people there and so I saw and I had to ask my dad dad what happened to your career and he's like son look we're all we all get fired that's just what happens and Howard what's your exit strategy when you get fired and you got to pick your pick your pants up and you got to go to work and my dad just loved to coach he didn't care where it was you know and so I think because I saw that that was like look when I went to you know Dominican Republic it taught me so many incredible things like I'm way better in timeouts now because my team couldn't speak my language yeah so I had to slow down my delivery I had to look down at the diagram board and then look into the player's eye to make sure through body language even though he didn't speak my language that I was slowing my delivery that my diagrams were clear and concise and I knew while it was going on that I was evolving to become a better coach because I would go back to my hotel room and say wow I had to slow down my delivery in late game situations and I had to sit the players in a certain way where the point guard was to my far right the center was to my top far left the two guard was next to the point guard the three guard or small four was next to the two the four was in between the five and the three my power forward so I became much more organized as a coach and I loved it you know and it was like this is awesome and then I got to go travel to all these places I never would so I never really looked at it like that until um it was actually an agent when I was trying to make the decision what to do and I made the decision to go back to the d league after many years of coaching and the agent said look the last place you coached was the head coach of the Cleveland or the last place you coached was the head coach of the Sacramento games if you stay out you're still that's where you are that's who you are the minute you go for the d league you're one of 16 d league coaches and those some of those guys have no real background but you're going to be thrown into that pool are you willing to do that and I said yeah I am I'm not worried about my perception and what my next job is after being an NBA head coach and I don't know if it was the right decision or the wrong decision I just know that I wanted to coach regardless of who where or what yeah I mean I I actually like I think change I think change is good I really you know like I work for Chuck daily and coach daily didn't talk much in practice and I asked him why one day and he said because you know when I speak in the huddle or when I speak in game or when I speak at halftime I want that to be powerful like EF Hutton and if I talk a lot in practice they're just going to drown me out what an incredible you know lesson and you know I think with the assistant coaches even my own son I mean he was with me one year at Nevada as a graduate assistant he came here you know to Arkansas where he's a recruiting director of recruiting and even after this year meaning it's his first year at Arkansas his second year I had you know some conversations with with Tom Tibido about Michael and the Knicks and just kind of try to open that like I initiated the conversation again because I know for me working for Chuck daily Doc Rivers Mike Fertello Lon Kruger Hubey but all those things shaped me and made me a better coach and so I would never want to you know hinder anybody else from but I do think you have to if you take that philosophy you are going to go into interviews and people are going to say why were you only with the Orlando magic for two years why were you only with the Atlanta Hawks for two years like you have to be ready to answer that and I'm not so sure early on in my career that everybody believed my reasoning but now that I'm 55 you know I don't really care like my career is what it is and so the truth of the matter is my mom was behind that philosophy and she would tell me like yeah go move leave Orlando and go to Atlanta and and and learn from somebody else and live in a new city and meet new friends and so I thought it was great advice