Mike Dunlap believes Michael Kidd-Gilchrist rates in the top one percent of players as a competitor.

Kidd-Gilchrist had a strong showing at the Las Vegas summer league.

"The little thing that showed up for us that wasn't highlighted is when the game's on the line, his uncanny ability to get offensive or defensive rebounds," Dunlap said.

Dunlap also noted Kidd-Gilchrist's ability to finish plays at the basket.

"Guys ricochet off him," Dunlap said. "He can finish against 7-footers."

LeBron James is likely to limit his minutes during the preseason, beginning with the possibility of skipping the opener on October 7th against the Hawks.

"I don't even know if I'll play much at all in that game," James said Sunday about the game in Atlanta.

The Heat are monitoring how much time James spends on the floor during drills.

James contends he is already in regular season shape.

"It does feel different," James said. "I'm in better shape right now than I've been, because I've played so much basketball. Usually, it takes me a week, a week-and-a-half of camp to kind of get back into it. But at the same time, I've still got to be cautious. I've played a lot of basketball and I've got to be cautious and not allow myself to be out there too much. We'll monitor that."

Rick Carlisle wants the Mavericks to operate out of the “flow” offense instead of set plays the majority of the time.

That means newly acquired point guard Darren Collison will have freedom to direct the team’s offense on the fly.

“My continuing goal, my ongoing goal is to call less or no plays if we can,” Carlisle said. “I think that that’s better. We want our guys to make plays, not call plays.”

Carlisle prefers to call plays only in specific situations, such as coming out of timeouts in crunch time.

“I want our system to be based on simplicity and counters and guys knowing which counters are there are how to react and respond appropriately, not having 75 plays that each have five options,” Carlisle said. “That’s too confusing.”

Doc Rivers is hoping to maximize the skills and abilities of Jeff Green this season.

"When he’s at the 3, I want him to be a power player, I want him to post more," Rivers explained. "That’s one of the things I thought I let him down when he was with us the first time, I didn’t think we posted him enough. I thought in the Miami series, if you remember, he had a little stretch in the post.

"I don’t have a big body of work to go with on Jeff. When he’s at the 4, I want him to be the fastest player in the gym. I want him to outrun [his defender and] one of the things we have been working on the last three weeks, is throwing the ball ahead to him on the break at the 4, and tell him to attack the basket. There’s a 4 guarding you that probably doesn’t want to guard you. We want him to be uptempo 4, power 3."

Green has spent the majority of his four-year career at small forward.

The Los Angeles Clippers hired shooting coach Bob Thate over the offseason.

Thate is working with all of the players, but Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan in particular.

"It's not one of those things where I'm going to be a great shooter overnight," said Griffin, who shot 52.1% from the free-throw line last season. "But I think I have the tools and I've got to keep working and keep practicing the right way."

Jordan, who shot 52.5% from the free-throw line last season, said that "it has improved" after working with Thate.

"I'm working with him every day," Jordan said. "I'm just going to continue to get better at it."

The Los Angeles Lakers are installing a hybrid of the Princeton offense this season.

Dwight Howard has been shown by the coaches how the system will create new scoring opportunities for him.

The Miami Heat added Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis in the offseason, improving upon a team that won the 2012 NBA Finals.

"It's scary to look in our locker room and say we can be better than we were last season," said LeBron James.

The Philadelphia 76ers frequently talked about adding a front office executive well-versed in analytics.

However, the 76ers eventually settled on a traditional general manager in Tony Di Leo.

“I have a formula that I have been using,” DiLeo said, “but what we are planning will take it to a whole different level of advanced analytics.  That’s the approach the ownership group has. They want to make sure that our front office has every advantage. It’s important to them to make sure that nobody is better prepared to make decisions.”

The 76ers want to hire someone to ascribe value to draft picks, free agents and any other parts of the process that go beyond traditional player evaluation.

“You can’t let it dominate your decisions; there has to be a happy marriage,” is how DiLeo described it.

The Dallas Mavericks have almost completely remade their roster since winning the 2011 NBA Finals.

This season, the Mavericks have eight new players.

"We have 31 days of training camp and then we're at the Lakers on national TV," Rick Carlisle said. "That 31 days is going to go by very quickly.

"We're not going to try and reinvent these guys. We're going to try to put them together into our system to make this thing work in a big way."

The Miami Heat added three-point specialists Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, but Erik Spoelstra said that their offensive strategy remains getting to the rim.

"That’s one of the things that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions about us," said Spoelstra.

The Heat hope the threat of reliable perimeter shooters opens up space for LeBron James and Dwyane Wade to penetrate to the basket.