“We’re not playing for nothing,” Blueger told MacIntyre. “You’ve got to have some respect and appreciation to be in this league, some respect for your teammates to play hard every night regardless of the standings. The whole idea of, like, tanking and building for the future. . . when you play meaningless games like this, no one’s learning anything… You’ve got to dig in, try to compete and win every game. And we can’t get deflated and just stop playing when things aren’t going our way. I think we’ve got to find some character in our group. I know we have some good guys that want to win and know how to win and to compete and play hard, but I think we’ve got to find it as a team. Just find, you know, probably some more respect for each other, some appreciation to be in this league (and) not take that for granted, not just go through the motions because we’re last in the league. You know, come in and compete.

“I mean, I’m kind of sick of talking about it. You know, we probably don’t have enough character as a group to dig in in those moments, and we just kind of get deflated too easily. No one can change that except for us. So we’ve got to take some more responsibility, more accountability. . . for each other, you know, just play hard for each other. We’re not really doing that consistently enough. And when we go against a team that knows how to win, it’s even more difficult.”