Q&A with 76ers forward Thaddeus Young

Thaddeus Young is focused on improving his mid-range game this offseason. (CSM/Landov)

Whenever business resumes in the NBA, forward Thaddeus Young is set to be a restricted free agent, with the 76ers controlling his rights. But as long as the lockout persists, Young will fill his time working on his game, building up his foundation and his Memphis-based AAU teams, and exploring the possibility of playing in China. Young spoke with SI.com this week about his offseason, and shared some insight into Philadelphia coach Doug Collins’ tough-love approach.

SI.com: Let’s start with the on-court stuff. Lots of players approach the offseason with the goal of working on one aspect of their game. What are you focusing on right now?

Young: I am in a gym every day working on my mid-range game. It is one of the biggest parts of my game, and I had some slippage in it last season. My coaches are basically saying that once I get that mid-range game down, I’ll be unstoppable. If I can get it to where [Sixers teammate] Elton Brand’s is, the sky is the limit.

SI.com: Are you working with anyone in particular?

Young: I’m working with [former NBA player and coach] John Lucas. My best year shooting was my second year, and I had worked with Mark Price that summer. I didn’t work with him or John Lucas last summer, and I was doing mostly other skill work then.

SI.com: Everyone loves to go to Price for shooting advice. Why can’t he help Rajon Rondo?

Young: [Laughing] I don’t know, man. It takes a lot of time if you’ve been shooting the ball the same way since you were a child. It’s all about shot mechanics and footwork. Mark is definitely a great shooter, and his assistant, Bruce [Kreutzer], takes it a bit overboard. He nitpicks every thing in your shot. He’ll find something wrong with your foot or your thumb.

SI.com: I assume they have video equipment and other fancy stuff set up to see those kinds of things?

Young: They sit and watch you, and then they take you into this room where they have this machine called Noah. This thing shows you the exact arc on your shot every time you shoot it. I was like, “What is the point of this?” But you start to realize, every time you make a shot, the same numbers come up. For me, it was about 48-50 degrees, in terms of arc, and it was a swish every time. But when I got up to 52 degrees or something like that, it was off. It was crazy.

SI.com: What about the three-point shot? The story goes that Doug Collins basically asked you to stop shooting those and focus on attacking the rim. Is that out of your game for good?

Young: No, no. I’m working on that, too. I work with John Lucas in Houston. All we do is work down there, man. It’s like 200 degrees in that gym. He’ll tell me to put up a crazy number of shots, like I’ll have to hit 200 bank shots from seven different spots on the floor. By the time you’re done working out, you don’t want to do anything else that day.

SI.com: I ran three miles yesterday, and I was dead tired.

Young: That’s one thing — I refuse to run with Coach Lucas and them. [Laughing]

SI.com: Coach Lucas runs with you guys?

Young: Oh, no. Coach Lucas isn’t running. He’ll be on a bike or something alongside you. But all the guys told me, “Whatever you do, don’t go to Memorial Park [in Houston] and run with him. Just don’t go.”

SI.com: Who told you that? Who else is there?

Young: Herb Pope, from Seton Hall, is down there. DeAndre Jordan. Jonny Flynn.

SI.com: Switching gears, your class of restricted free agents is in a weird place, where you’ll hit the market under a new set of rules. In theory, we really have no idea what those rules will be, but do you and your agent assume at this point that the Sixers will control your rights?

Young: Yeah. I think it’s going to be the same for us, as far as restricted free agency.

SI.com: So have you and your agent sat down, looked at the teams that should have cap space and started thinking about where you might fit?

Young: We had a long meeting about a month and a half ago where we looked at all that stuff — the teams with space, good fits, bad fits.

SI.com: Any teams you like out there?

Young: I can’t really say just now. I don’t want to start anything up.

SI.com: You like Philly, though, right?

Young: Yeah, I like Philly. I’m happy with whatever way it goes. I don’t just want to play someplace for one year. I want a long-term deal. Whatever team is willing to commit to me, I’m going to commit to them.

SI.com: In the meantime, you’ve been pretty open about your willingness to play in China. Beyond the money, some agents have speculated that there might be merchandising deals to strike abroad — that maybe an international team could promise a player a huge percentage of revenue from jersey sales or something. Did that come up at all in talks with Chinese teams?

Young: Something like that was built into the offer we got from one of the Chinese teams, but I’m not going to talk about the logistics of it or anything. But they promised to help me look into business opportunities and branding opportunities.

SI.com: Building a brand is a good thing in general, but the theory is that finding ways for guys to earn money during a lockout is a form of leverage for the players, right?

Young: It’s more of a focus now. There are way more opportunities out there for us than just the NBA. The NBA, as a league, can make crazy deals on its own because it has the players. When you have the world’s best guys on one stage, you can’t do anything but make deals. But now for the players, it’s about how you market yourself.

SI.com: Why didn’t Doug Collins want you to guard LeBron James in the first round of the playoffs, even when Miami went small and you guys were both at power forward?

Young: It was more because they wanted me to help a lot. They put Evan [Turner] on LeBron and Dre [Andre Iguodala] on [Dwyane] Wade. The coaches told us, If it’s Dre and Wade coming toward you, don’t help — Dre is a great on-ball defender. But if it’s [Turner] coming toward you guarding LeBron, you’re going to double-team, because Evan’s good, but he’s not the kind of defender Dre is.

SI.com: So it wasn’t necessarily about Collins thinking LeBron was just a bad matchup for you?

Young: Sometimes [Collins] doesn’t want me to guard the best player on the other team. He doesn’t want to wear me down. We brought up the issue several times, that maybe I should be guarding LeBron, but sometimes it’s better for me to stay on a big man, because I’m one of the best guys on the team in terms of guarding the screen-and-roll as a big man.

SI.com: Does Collins still agonize over everything like he did as a younger coach?

Young: Oh, yeah. That was one of the things that took me a long time to get used to. He hates mistakes. The first time he met me, he said, “I don’t want you to be a mistake player.” And I think at that practice, I made mistakes on like my first five plays, and he was just killing me. He was really tough. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that he nitpicks everything. But at one point, I was like, “That’s what I need. I need someone to stay tough with me.”

And, man, he pulls out these stats sometimes. One time, he walked around to all the bigs on the team, asking us how many rebounds we got combined over the last four games, because we were getting outrebounded. He told use we had something like 50 rebounds between all of us. And I was like, “What? Somebody has to be stealing them. The guards are taking our rebounds.” Because we have Jrue [Holiday], Evan and Dre, and they are all good rebounders.

SI.com: I have to say, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a player more committed to the 2-for-1 concept at the end of quarters than your teammate Lou Williams.

Young: We actually have a play called “Go Lou.” It works every time. We run it when we’re taking the ball out under our own basket, on the other side of the court, and it’s pretty much just giving the ball to Lou, setting a screen and just watching him go. Sometimes we’ll discuss it at the last minute, and he’ll tell me that instead of shooting, he’ll drive inside the three-point line, bring the ball back out and have me set a screen for him so he can run a screen-and-roll.

But, yeah, it’s known around the league that he loves the 2-for-1. If there are 35 seconds left, he’s getting it. Everyone knows that.