More From Media Day: Kevin Ollie Sees “Opportunities, Not Obstacles”

NEW YORK – Here are some more of Kevin Ollie’s comments at Big East Media Day.

On Jim Calhoun’s presence. “… I’d say we talk every other day. I call him, he doesn’t usually call me. We’ll sit down after practice and talk, just the two of us, for two or three hours. I don’t know where the time goes. We have a special relationship that way. … He knows when to back off, he knows when it’s time for me to do what I need to do. He wasn’t at First Night, he wasn’t at the first practice. But I always want him to be around.”

On Omar Calhoun: “ … He’s going to be a special, special player. You can see it by the way he handles things. If you see something in practice he doesn’t go right, you tell him and he fixes it. That’s how you know you have a great player. You don’t have to tell him over and over and over. … He’s a physical specimen for a freshman. And one thing I didn’t know, he can play defense.”

On DeAndre Daniels: “ … We need to condition him to run all the time. If he does, there’s no four [power forward] that can keep up with him. Maybe a three [small forward], but no fours.”

On The One-Season Contract: “… I’m no worried. I care. Those are two different words. I care about the university, I care about this team, I care that it does things the right way, but I’m not worried. Whether I’m here seven months, seven years or 27 years, I’m going to take it one day at a time. If Warde [Manuel] decides I should have the job, so be it. If not, so be it. But at the end of the day I am going to give it my all, and that’s all I can do. … I don’t see obstacles, I see opportunities.”

On Being Picked Ninth in the Big East: “… It’s no extra motivation. We don’t need any extra motivation. We’re motivated because of who we are. We’re playing for what all the great players who have come before us have built. We have a legacy and we have to live up to it.”

More on Jim Calhoun: “… I remember when I first came to UConn, him going over stats and he’d be convinced – he’d convince us – that every team we played was the No.1 team in the country. I’d be thinking, ‘Coach, shouldn’t we win this game by 40 points?’ I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now. I didn’t understand the four-hour coaches meetings, but now I find myself doing that, meeting for three hours.”