Stephen Litel has an Extended chat with Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve: Honest thoughts about hading into the draft...and into high expectations from fans and media.

SLAM: Again, at your press conference, you spoke of defense and rebounding. What do you see as the biggest challenge in implementing that more into the team?

Reeve: You know what? I don’t see challenges from the standpoint of implementation or even the players buying into it. Maybe that’s naïve, but it’s really not that hard. We’ll be very, very consistent in our coaching efforts, they’ll know exactly what they’re supposed to do and when, it’s simplified and it’s not like there is a dynamic plan that we’ll have to spend three weeks preparing for. It’s very, very basic defensive fundamentals and it’s just about being harder to play against on that side of the ball. The only time they’re going to see me get upset at practice is if we’re not defending and rebounding, so it’s not what you teach. It’s what you emphasize and that’s definitely going to be an emphasis through three weeks of training camp.

I’m a big believer in what you do in training camp defines who you are in the WNBA during the regular season. It absolutely does. I’ve been doing this for a long time. If you have a good training camp, it usually translates into a solid season. If you have a bad training camp, it’s going to be a rocky season and we saw that with the Shock in 2009. We had players all over the place, we had injuries and it was tumultuous.