Midseason Q&A with Rick Sund <div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">SUPERSONICS.COM: Given the injuries to Ray Allen and Nick Collison, how has the team performed relative to your expectations so far this season? Rick Sund: Way better. You're talking about missing two rotation players - in Ray's case, a starter, in Nick's case maybe a starter, maybe a backup at the four or the five. I was hoping we could stay around .500, keep our head above water. I would say, if I was going to analyze this year, up to this point, we're dead even, .500, I would say we've had some very exciting and significant wins this season. At Minnesota, at Milwaukee (Milwaukee's got a great home record), at Philly, at Detroit, Sacramento in our place after we got beat down there. Some real good wins. At the same time, we've had some what I would call disappointing losses, teams that, particularly at home, on paper we're favored to beat and we lose. That's the mark, generally, of a young club, and we're young. When the season started, the demographics showed we had the third least-experienced team in the NBA. You throw in that and Ray's injury, I think overall we're where we should be. We've got some significant wins and some disappointing losses. The second half of the season, we want to maintain that level of play against the good teams but keep their focus so we can win some of those games that were disappointing losses. If we do that, we've got a shot at the playoffs. That was our goal, to get some significant development to our guys, see how our chemistry works, experiment and still try to make it to the playoffs. What, in your opinion, are the pleasant surprises of this season? Sund: I think, if you talk about last June to now, last June if you'd have told me that Flip Murray would be as good as he is, I would have said, 'Let's hope', but I wouldn't have known that. I saw a lot of things this summer, I saw things in training camp, I saw things when Ray went down and he stepped in, I see some things coming off the bench. This is a rookie year. He shouldn't be on the sophomore team (in the got Milk? Rookie Challenge), he should be on the rookie team. He only played 62 minutes - he barely played an hour's worth of basketball last year in the NBA, so this is really his rookie year. I thought Luke (Ridnour), when we drafted him, figured to be the fifth guard on our team. When Ray went down and Antonio (Daniels) started the season with a bad back, he moved into the third role and even had some opportunities starting while we had these injuries, so that was good experience for him. He should be a senior in college, so what we've seen in him, we like. Now he's got a long ways to go, we know that, but the bottom line is there are definitely some positive things with him. </div> <font size="1">Full Interview from Supersonics.com.</font>
