Nets coach Jeremey Bettle: Mirza Teletovic "works as hard as anyone I have ever trained"

When Mirza Teletovic arrived in training camp in October after leading Team Bosnia to a place in next year's Eurobasket, he hit the weight room hard ... too hard, as it turned out. His training regimen in Europe had always been about strength and he figured the smart move was to get even stronger still.

It turned out to be the wrong regimen, as Scott Carriola of the Wall Street Journal wrote in early November. He realized that "it wasn't really good for me." His arms were tired from all the lifting. His shots were coming up short. So the Nets assigned Dr. Jeremy Bettles, their highly regarded conditioning coach, to work with Teletovic. It seemed to have worked earlier this month when Teletovic got minutes and looked like the scorer he had been in Europe. His minutes have dropped off lately.

It's not because of conditioning issues. On Thursday, Bettle offered high praise for Teletovic in a Twitter exchange with Nets fan BigNetsFan16.

BigNetsFan16: Jeremy, what kind of work have you done with Mirza's body since the beginning of the season?

Bettle: Worked on nutrition, anaerobic intervals [to improve speed and endurance], and altered his lifting style. He's a beast!

BigNetsFan16: Nice...it's showing!

Bettle: He works as hard as anyone I have ever trained.

BigNetsFan16: Wow...I guess you don't lead Europe in scoring without working extremely hard. Now lets get him more minutes!

By Sunday morning, Bettle's comments on Bogdanovic's training regimen --along with his nine points off the bench vs. the Rockets-- was the lead story on SportSport Bosnia, the country's leading sports site.