Playing hard can take you a long way, and Boucher is living proof of concept; he has eight seasons in the NBA to show for it. The next step was to not just play hard, but also play smart: to see the floor better, to make the extra pass, to take fewer and more calculated risks on defence, to be more focused and make fewer mistakes. “I think there was a lot of stuff that I was doing that I kept saying I gotta do better, but I never changed it,” Boucher said. “Obviously, when things are going well and you’re playing all the time you [think], well, I’m just going to keep doing what I’m going. But by the time I wasn’t playing, I was like, all right, well, now I’ve gotta figure it out or I won’t be here no more.”