Glen Taylor's Plan to Lose Big

{Q}   Has the team been profitable in all of its previous years?

{A}   The last three years, we have not been profitable. Most of the years before that, we were.

{Q}   Have you ever lost this much in a year?

{A}   No. The first 10 years in the business, we lost a little bit or we made a little bit. We never made $15 million, but we always made around $5 million or $7 million. We initially purchased the club and borrowed $40 million to $45 million, but in those years, we were able to pay that off.

{Q}   So how much are you borrowing at this point?

{A}   I don’t know that we’re going to borrow any this year, because we probably have internal money to handle it. But over the past three years, we have borrowed money.

{Q}   What's the strategy for turning things around and protecting your investment?

{A}   It’s the traditional goal of finding a number of talented young people, not just one individual. Right now, we have eight young guys on our team. Our goal is that three of those players will be the type you can build around. By keeping those players around—the one we have signed now to the long term is Al Jefferson—the fans buy into those players and want to see them develop.

{Q}   How do you market the team in this situation?

{A}   We adjusted our marketing before the season began. We are not focusing on one individual, KG, like we had for years and years. We’ve been focused on [the idea] that we’re one, in the sense that we’re a bunch of young guys, but we’re playing together.

{Q}   What happens if the losing persists into 2008–09?

{A}    It’s way too early for me to even speculate. If you don’t play well, you get high draft choices and these are things that can change your program around.

{Q}   Will the team need a capital infusion at that point?

{A}   That’s an alternative, but it isn’t a real high one on our plans. We have the ability to borrow a lot of money if we needed to, and we could sustain that over quite a period of time if we had to. But that’s not our plan. These are all fallbacks. Long range, I’m planning on owning the team.