Q. Corey, how do you sum up the season that was for this team?
COREY KISPERT: Heavy hitter right off the bat. (Laughter).
I would say that it was a roller coaster, honestly. There were a lot of high moments and a lot of fun, but there were -- let's not kid ourselves, there was a lot of low ones, too. A lot of looking around, a lot of questions. But that comes with every NBA season in different levels. Ours was just a different level than everybody else's. There's definitely so much to look back on and grow from and get better from and be proud of and excited about, and that's what especially this summer and moving into next season is all about is just capitalizing and taking advantage of and seeing every opportunity possible to make this team better.
Q. What do you think playing faster did for the team as a whole? I know you said you were very comfortable and liked playing that style.
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, I love it. It allows us to play off of our instincts, to take advantage of lazy defense, steal a few easy baskets here and there, and also it requires more out of us as players. Like you have to be in better shape and you have to focus more. When you're running that and playing that fast, you have to be locked in on everything else even more because you're tired.
I love that challenge. That's the way that I grew up playing. That's the way I feel comfortable playing. That's the way I play when I'm at my best.
I think it's something that we need to continue to do and lean on more. If I had it my way, we'd be playing even faster, to be honest with you.
Q. Looking at the state of the franchise early on in the rebuild, obviously looking at the progression of younger players like yourself, looking at more than wins and losses, what progression have you seen from this team that gives you hope for the future?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, we've had a couple meetings now that the season is over, and we've been asked this question, like did anybody not get better this year, and everyone got better this year. Everyone kept their hands down, and everyone knows to a man that they've improved. That was one of our key pillars and I know central themes this year was player development and getting better, and everybody has. I know I have. I hope you guys have seen it. I'm super proud of how I've played this year and the way that I've gotten better.
That's the hope for the future. As we get better individually, we only get better collectively. Like a rising tide raises all the ships.
If everybody is getting better and everyone is doing their job to come back next summer or next season better than they were when the season ended, it's only going to be a positive for us. All of the stuff -- more hope that comes from the season is the stuff that you guys can't even see, the stuff that we work on in our locker room, how we grow together in our accountability, in our quality of our relationships between players. All of that is going to lead to a better brand of basketball, but it doesn't happen immediately.
To the untrained eye and the casual viewer, there's no way they could see that happening, but I promise you that we are so much better now than we were even three months ago in that stuff.
Q. You've talked a lot about the biggest thing you've been impressed about yourself has been your consistency all season long. How much of that do you think when we talked earlier between-the-ears growth that you took, how much do you think that played a role in your consistency being what it was this season?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, I would say -- that's a great question, and it's the biggest factor into my consistency. My first two years I would hang on to these bad games or bad moments so, so tightly, and I would stress over them and I would lose sleep over them, and then it would affect me the next day.
In this business, things happen so fast and games come so quickly that the moment you hold on to something that you've done previously, you're screwed. Those things bleed into days and bleed into weeks and bleed into your season.
The way that I've gotten better at letting things go and letting games come and riding the highs and lows and knowing that either or both are temporary was super important for me, and a big credit goes to not only the people in this building that have been in my corner and helping me work and helping me develop, kind of my little decimal group, but also my wife, too. This is her first season in D.C., and when I came home and -- she played. She understands the game. She comes to these games not as a fan but -- she gets her basketball fix coming to our games. So we talk about it, and it's amazing how coming home to her and being able to vent that stuff to her completely washed away any emotions that I had. I slept like a baby every night. It was the best season of sleep that I've ever had.
All of that to say the way that I've been able to flush games, good or bad, has been the biggest part of my growth.
Q. I actually wanted to ask about the impact your wife has. Being able to have those conversations with her, how much of it is her utilizing her basketball IQ and being like, babe, last night --
COREY KISPERT: You were trash, yeah.
Q. In all honesty, the conversations, is there ever a time where she's having conversations almost kind of like an extra player development coach, hey, if you had gone this way you would have had a better opportunity versus what you did?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, all the time. Nightly basis pretty much. She's not doing it in a critical way. She's curious. She wants to learn more and she wants to know more about my game and how I fit into the NBA game. We have pretty high-level intelligent conversations about basketball, and that's helped me a ton.
Credit to her for taking on that kind of stress and my stress because as soon as there's a creek in the dam and she asks that question, it's gushing, so I'm gushing to her, and it feels like it's probably a huge weight on her shoulders, but she handled it with grace and corrected me and got my head back on straight when I needed it, and it takes a lot of guts to be able to tell a grown man what to do and how to get better, and she did it with grace and helped me a ton this year.
Q. What does the team need from its next coach, whomever it is?
COREY KISPERT: We need a connector. We need somebody who runs to or isn't afraid of conflict, runs to difficult things, and is a master communicator and connector, I guess.
The NBA is all about managing 15 egos and making sure everybody feels connected and incorporated for the betterment of the team. It's a really difficult thing to be able to do that while also building a great high-quality team and raising the level of our play.
Just as much as we need somebody who's brilliant on a white board and can drop X's and O's and read the flow of the game, we need somebody to be able to connect and relate and communicate to us as players. That's pretty much the bottom line.
Q. You talked about being consistent and being able to flush out bat games, but X's and O's-wise, would you say using your body more to get into the paint has been one of your biggest jumps in terms of on-court performance, or was it another aspect of your game?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, it's taken me a while to realize how strong I am. I didn't play a lot in the paint my first two years, and even growing up as a kid, I would just kind of run around and shoot threes. The more I play in the paint, the more I realize how much I can use my body. That's just been kind of another small detail that I want to tighten the screws on this summer is just to be really intentional about how strong I am and how I can use my body to my advantage. You see guys do it all the time in the NBA, and there's no reason why I can't.
Q. Back in October you said you wanted to be more of a vocal leader in addition to being a lead-by-example guy. Were you able to do that this year?
COREY KISPERT: 100 percent. 100 percent.
Q. You've played with a handful of point guards already even though you've only been here for three years. What do you think Tyus added to the organization?
COREY KISPERT: Tyus is like our chill pill. He's like our anxiety medication. He's able to see the big picture and tell it like it is but also keep us all locked in and comfortable. He sets the table. He makes sure everybody is involved and everybody is doing well, and he's super, super high level at that.
Then you can just tell by his game, he doesn't turn the ball over ever. He never gets flustered. Things don't rattle him. When you have a guy leading your offense that has those qualities, it settles you in even more.
I've also really gotten -- loved getting to know Tyus this year, too. I have a couple friends and former teammates who have played with him before, and before I met him, they were all telling me, you're going to love Tyus, you're going to love playing with him. He's the best. The list goes on and on and on. He met those expectations and then also exceeded them in my experience playing with him.
Q. I've asked you about a number of things that have changed in the organization. I wonder what's the most impactful thing Will and Michael were able to do this year.
COREY KISPERT: I would say that their communication, not only about what they could share with us about /WAFS going on, when we made trades this year, they were communicated to us before it ever got communicated to us through the media, and even like communication within departments on the day-to-day or if I needed to be a certain place for a meeting in the morning before practice I knew exactly where I needed to go and how to access that information. So those things are really important to you as a player when you have a million things going on. You don't have to worry about where you need to be. It helped things run really smoothly while we were here at the facility or game days at the arena or on the road. Communication lines were always open, and I felt like I knew exactly what I needed to do on a day-to-day.
Q. Going back to the strength question, I don't want this to come across comical, but how can you balance getting stronger while also not utilizing that strength to mess up the golf game? I'm thinking of DeChambeau, Rahm; how do you balance that because I know that is a huge part of your life in the off-season as far as decompressing.
COREY KISPERT: Of course. I don't think I need -- getting stronger for me, I guess, is especially now this summer is not adding 10 pounds and being jacked when I come back. It's just using the strength that I have. I think I have plenty of it. I think I have more than enough to be able to succeed on the course and on the greens.
But I just need to be able to -- that was corny, I'm sorry. To be able to learn how to use it and use it effectively. It's just something that I haven't really explored and tapped into yet. It just takes reps.
Q. Speaking of your improvement, getting to the rim and finishing around the rim, how did that change how defenses defended you and how you were able to counter them and attack opposing defenses?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, it changed everything. It changed everything. It seemed like my first two years if I just put the ball on the floor the other team was cool with it, and they were fine with that, and that's what they wanted me to do. But now it's felt a little bit different. It felt like there were multiple layers to what teams had to do to help stop what I'm trying to do. Just because I put the ball on the deck doesn't mean the job is done for the defense anymore. There was help side, there was guys in gaps, there were rotational defenders that were coming into the mix, and it's a fun challenge for me because now I've got to grow my game even more. I have to see the picture ahead of time and I have to make the next read and the third read. Those things excite you as a player. There's more details to add. There's more things to build on. It's a really, really fun opportunity.
It's a cool thing as a player to feel like you have a little bit more respect from the defense than you ever have before and people know that you're a threat.
It was really cool. It was just kind of a cool validation of what I've been trying to do and trying to get at for years now.
Q. In addition to learning how to use your strength, what are some of the areas that you want to improve on on court over the summer?
COREY KISPERT: Yeah, this summer for me is all about details. It's all about -- it's not like I need to add a brand new skill to my game or Corey needs to learn how to do this if he wants to succeed. No, it's like I think I have pretty much everything it's going to take, but it's just like small, small details, mastery, tighten the screws on X, Y and Z. So it's going to be a super intense summer, not as far as workload or trying to add brand new stuff. It's just like tightening up the screws and making marginal improvements on what I have, and I think it's really going to make big, big differences.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports