“I have Mike Thibault with me as well, who appreciates you guys coming out to discuss with us what we have going on. Just as a formality, we have sent qualifying offers to all of our players. We have received some things back. We have just signed today Lindsay Whalen to a three year contract those terms are not disclosed. We also received a training camp contract for Jamie Carey so she’ll be in training camp as well. We have not heard from any other players at this point, which is not usual. Today is the first day until training camp we have to sign players and we expect that we will talk to more players in the coming days. The major issue today is what you read, published reports are correct. We are trading Katie Douglas to the Indiana Fever for Tamika Whitmore, the No. 12 pick in the 2008 draft and the rights to Jessica Foley who was selected in the 2006 draft by the Fever. She is a 6 foot guard from Duke and she is current playing in Adelaide, Australia where Erin Phillips plays.”
“Just to give you a little background on this, and what we’re going to do, is have Katie Douglas join us on the teleconference. She’ll have a strict time limit because of her obligations with the Fever this afternoon. I believe she is doing an announcement in person and it will be carried on NBA TV. We’re going to have Tamika Whitmore on the phone for you as well so you can ask her questions and certainly Mike and I will answer questions. A little bit of background, last year KT was signed to a one year deal. That was by design. KT was unsure if she wanted to stay in Connecticut or not so we made an agreement that we would sign her for one year and if she decided to go to Indiana that we would help accommodate that only if we had a fair trade. That was the only place she would go. KT is from Indiana so we accommodated that. That said, we feel that we have more than fair value with Tamika, she’s a very tough go-to player, and the No. 12 pick and Jessica Foley. I’m going to let Mike say a few things if he’d like to and then we’re going to get KT online for everybody.”
Opening Statement From Head Coach Mike Thibault
“I’ll reserve most of my comments for after we talk to KT. Let her come on and do that. But it is very hard, I think, to go forward as team when you have a player who is being tugged in other directions and she will tell you, could not fully invest herself in being with the Connecticut Sun long term. We went through this a little bit last year with Taj McWilliams, but that was a little bit different situation; Taj is in the late part of her career. KT is in the middle of her career, but it’s a situation that given her circumstances, her family and other things that we accommodated this. This is not something we want to make a habit of or something we’d do on a normal basis. And as Indiana knows and KT knows, this was done only if we felt we could get a fair trade. In the off-season and especially our team, I think both people would agree that our front line needed a huge under going or over haul. Adding Tamika Whitmore and Sandrine Gruda to go along with Asjha and Le’Coe and Kristen gives us one of the best front lines in the Eastern Conference, if not the league, and so we’re in this situation were we’re able to improve our team. We’ll have work to do in the area with replacing KT but I think we’ve solved an issue that was a glaring issue on our team a year ago. We did not have a lot of depth in the front line. Tamika played great against us in the playoffs, she played great against other top teams over the last couple years and I think she is a mature and talented player in this league. We’ll go forth. I’ll answer other questions and talk about other things later on but that’s the general background of the trade.”
