Tim Legler

Embracing that level of pressure, the scrutiny that comes with the hype that you had coming into the league, being picked number one, all of that.

The thing I loved about it, he said one time in an interview, he used the word responsibility.

He looked at it as his responsibility as the number one pick.

coming into the league to lead this franchise back to that place that they had been for so long.

You don't hear guys talk like that.

Like, bring it on.

I want that.

Most guys will talk around that, actually, because they're trying to get their feet wet and they're trying to live up to it, but without necessarily pointing the finger at themselves or

and saying, yeah, I'm kind of built for this, and I'm not going to stop until I get there.

That's what his approach has been the entire time.

Man, is it easy to rally around that from a coaching staff perspective, the role players on that team.

When your best player carries himself like that and wants all the responsibility and the light shown on him in good times and bad, it is so easy for everybody else in that locker room to fall into place, and you develop this incredible chemistry

which they've been able to replicate very similar to what they had in the Duncan, Genevieve Parker days.

Well, yeah, we saw the tape.

And when you're looking at the tape and you see him, then you start to see him a couple times live, and you're kind of going...

Wow.

You never really see anything quite like it, but you don't know how much he's going to be able to add early enough in his career in terms of functional strength.

That was the thing that I needed to see him add because in that league, these are grown men, and it's going to be difficult to operate 7'5", trying to dribble the basketball around when you've got guys getting up into your hip, into your lower body, manipulating you, moving you, pushing you all over the court.

The functional strength he's added even just in the last couple of years is incredible, and that's what's allowing him now to be dominant offensively.

We knew the defense, even I don't care how thin he stayed, he could have been a weakling his entire life.