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GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS MEDIA CONFERENCEMay 25, 2019Andrew BogutOakland, California Q. How have the scrimmages been going? ANDREW BOGUT: We've only had one. We had one yesterday. Today is a bit of a lighter today and we'll have another one on Monday, but yeah, it's just a matter of being sharp. We're not going too crazy, like guys have an open dunk, all that, we're not trying to take each other out, but just a matter of getting the legs going, and feels pretty good. Q. What were your impressions of DeMarcus is looking? ANDREW BOGUT: He looked good. He's obviously had a long track of recovery, so now it's a matter of him feeling like he can get into game shape. Once you actually get out there and play five on five and simulate a game, it's much different than doing conditioning on a machine or all that kind of stuff. I've been through that many a times and he knows it's the same, so he's trying to grind up to get to a position where he can play a full game. Q. What makes Steve Kerr different than other guys you've played for? ANDREW BOGUT: I don't think he's afraid of doing different things at times, whether his rotation is XYZ, he's not afraid to go ABC, and there's a lot of coaches that get in their own way a lot, whereas he'll randomly put in a guy in the starting lineup that hasn't started all year, like we saw that with J.B. this last playoff series, myself coming in from Australia, and the first game back he starts me. Like he's not afraid to do that. When a coach has at that confidence in guys, especially on the bench, it's great, and he thinks outside the box, and I think himself and his staff, the things they look at, you know, you'd argue that when this all started it wasn't traditional basketball with the way our lineups were and how small we went at times. He's definitely changed the game. Q. Steve seems like a leader who's also open to other people's opinions and observations, that he'll take input from everybody. ANDREW BOGUT: Yeah, definitely, and you kind of have to be like that these days, with kind of the crop of kids coming through. They obviously want to get their point of view across and feel like they're being heard even if they're not. That's very important these days. It's almost as important as coaching is that psychological off-the-court culture type stuff, and Steve is one of the most approachable head coaches I've been around. Sometimes he'll take input, and sometimes he won't. But he'll always listen, and that's very, very important. Q. How is Klay sort of involved defensively? You were here obviously a few years ago. He's always been known as a good defender, but maybe how is he different now than he was? ANDREW BOGUT: Just experience. I think he's an all-league defender. He does a great job really taking the challenge personally. It's very rare for a shooter. You aren't often going to see shooters like him that can defend. You just don't -- it just doesn't happen, and he's one of the few that can run off screens, knock down threes, he can get hot and iso himself, but he takes that other end very, very personally, and a lot of times we have him mismatching with Andre on their best player, and I think it takes a toll. Especially we saw that Portland series, I think it took a toll over the course of the series, those guys, where you're seeing Andre or Klay. It's not easy. Q. It seems like Portland, for example, against Lillard, going against a smaller guard, it seems like Klay's size and length really bothers smaller guards, as good as they are. ANDREW BOGUT: Yeah, it is, and we figured that out early my time with the Clippers. We started putting Klay on Chris Paul back when the Clippers had their half-decent team, and yeah, he -- generally we used to start just traditional staff, but once we started putting Klay on Chris, we noticed Chris didn't like that, and it really worked out well for us, and then ever since then, we haven't been afraid to put Klay on bigger guys, bigger forwards at times, and smaller guards. He's one of the most valuable guys in this league in my opinion because he plays both ends of the floor. Q. You guys have been trapping more these Playoffs. What were the keys to trapping successfully? ANDREW BOGUT: Mixing it up. So you don't want to have a steady diet of one thing. I think that Portland series was one of the best kind of rounds of coaching I've seen from Steve, that I've ever been a part of, the way he mixed up lineups. He was open to input. We were changing when we were blitzing at times. Like sometimes we would just blitz straightaway. Sometimes we would switch with Leonard and Lillard and then run off Leonard late. So we did a great job mixing it up. I think any team in this league gets a steady diet of something, especially with days to prepare, they'll punish you, but I think the reason why we were so successful against Portland is we kept changing things up. Even though at the end of the day, it still was a blitz, we're changing when we were doing it, for how long we were doing it. Sometimes we blitzed until a pass-out, sometimes we blitzed until he took one back step and then we left. I think that's really annoying if you're a guy like Lillard or McCollum because you don't know when to find your rhythm. Q. Quinn Cook seems to be a guy that everyone likes, gets along with everyone. How important is it having a guy like that on your bench? ANDREW BOGUT: I think, yeah, I think Quinn is a prime example of that bench. I think we have a lot of guys like that. I think guys understand their role. I think for a lot of other teams in the league, Quinn is probably a 20-minute off-the-bench player, and there's at times for us where he doesn't play. That's just the reality of the situation. You're here with a championship winning team. But you couldn't really tell on a day-to-day basis that he hasn't played the night before or whether he's played 20 minutes, and I think that's a sign of a really good teammate. He seems like an ambassador for the whole league. He kind of knows everybody. He's played against everybody at some point. He's been to numerous guys' camps when he was a young fella. He's a great guy to have in the locker room. Q. Jarrett Jack is kind of a mentor; do you see any similarities between him and Jarrett? They're from the same area -- ANDREW BOGUT: A little bit. Jarrett was very similar. They're very open. They can have a laugh, as well, and joke around, and Jarrett Jack is one of my favorite teammates. Looking back, he was an awesome veteran to have around us, and his journey has been a pretty impressive journey with what he's had to deal with. It's no surprise that Quinn is very similar. Q. There seems to be a bit of a national narrative that if you guys don't have Durant that either of these two teams will be a difficult match-up for you guys. What's your reaction to that? ANDREW BOGUT: Well, if we don't play with the basketball, it could be called soccer. At the end of the day, the don'ts and the dos, I think this team even when I was here the last time have dealt with that kind of stuff all the time, and we're not really too worried about it. Injuries happen. Obviously I'm not saying -- we want KD and DeMarcus fully healthy, but they're not at the moment, and we have to make adjustments, and it's by association. All the media stuff, it's just mindboggling. I guess they have to -- especially on ESPN, they have to have something to talk about, but the fact that they're talking about his free agency and all that kind of stuff, it's just a distraction for our fans and for our franchise that we don't need. As far as the locker room, we don't discuss it. We know it's by association, but you know, I guess some journalists will have that story ready already, that they can't win without KD, and some journalists will have their story ready saying they play better without KD. So flip a coin and we'll see what happens at the end of the series. Q. You seem to have had answers up until now for whoever is hurt, right? ANDREW BOGUT: We have. There has been adjustment periods. Obviously Steph had an adjustment period in the Houston series but battled through and was phenomenal in the last couple games. But there are different ways we play with different guys in the lineup. Obviously with KD in there we want to make sure we get him the ball in isolation situations as much as possible because he's so deadly, but with him out of the lineup the ball is moving a little bit more and Draymond is pushing. We're comfortable playing both ways, and in my opinion there's ebbs and flows within the game that you need to play different styles. Q. And you have to adapt further depending on the opponent? ANDREW BOGUT: Exactly, yeah, and that's a big difference. Q. These guys are both longer than Portland -- ANDREW BOGUT: Milwaukee play a very similar pace to us right now. Toronto play a very similar pace to when we have KD going iso on that, so it's kind of similar in a way. We feel like we can match up both ways, and that's the beauty of our team, we can grind it out in the half court if we have to, but we can also run and go with the best of them. Q. What have you been doing to kill all this time between -- ANDREW BOGUT: I have two kids, so that answers your question. Not a whole lot. You get home and you look at the clock and it's 8:00 at night. Yeah, that's basically it, really. Just trying to help my wife as much as I can when I get home. And just being around the kids while I'm home. Probably some of the single guys will be a little bit bored, but yeah, with kids -- two kids under two or one just over two, there's not a whole lot of time for relaxation. Q. Are you keeping an eye on what's going on in the other series? ANDREW BOGUT: Yeah, definitely. There's not a lot of basketball on anyway, so we'll watch it tonight. It's been an entertaining series. It's been a prime example of a Conference Finals, how it should be, where there's swings and flows, and it feels like the series has turned two or three times, and depending on what happens tonight, it could turn back again. Q. Now that you're days away from the Finals, what are you thinking about, having come back to this team -- ANDREW BOGUT: Just what I have been since I got here, whether it's one minute or no minutes or 10 minutes, just play to the best of my ability, as hard as I can, and just be a good voice on the bench, just kind of trying to be a second coach out there, making sure that our bench guys know what's going on and how we're doing this on this coverage, how we made an adjustment. We're just trying to talk. I think I feel like I see the game in a pretty decent way, and just trying to be a good teammate at the end of the day. There's going to be times in this series where I might not play and there's going to be times when I do. I just make sure I do what I can. Q. Do you catch yourself thinking about what it would be like to win a championship? ANDREW BOGUT: Yes and no. We won the first one, and then the second one we were trying to go back to back, we probably caught ourselves maybe doing that a little bit, and it hurt us. You can always look to the future, but I think right now we want to focus on getting four more wins and then we can talk about all that. Q. You talked about how you contribute on the bench. Cousins and KD, do they also do that, either in the locker room or during practices? ANDREW BOGUT: Yeah, I think everybody is in different stages, and some guys are different, just generally, with human nature. Some guys are a little bit more quieter, especially when they're not playing, they might not feel like they should say something because they're not out there. So everybody is different. KD has definitely had some great input for us, DeMarcus the game. Myself and DeMarcus, we try to help keep Draymond calm as much as possible at times, so that's a role in itself. But everyone is different. Q. Who's the future coach of this team? On this team, which guy is going to be an NBA coach if you had to pick one guy? ANDREW BOGUT: Oh, wow, that's a tough one. Andre is adamant that he'd never coach in the NBA, but I think his basketball IQ and his professionalism could make him a head coach if he wanted to be, but he claims there's no chance of that ever happening. So have to scrub him off. Klay definitely not because he said he doesn't want to be involved in coaching at all. Steph, possibly. I could see Steph being involved. Most likely Draymond. I think Draymond has got a good IQ for the game. Q. Obviously you guys aren't rooting for someone in the Eastern Conference Finals, but would it make it easier if the Raptors closed out tonight just so you guys can go ahead with your intense game planning and have some finality of who you're playing? ANDREW BOGUT: First of all, "rooting" in Australia means a whole different thing. I'll leave that up to you all what that means. Yeah, look, it is a little bit hard to prepare for the next series not knowing who you're playing, so we would like it to be wrapped up. But at the same time, we definitely won't be against it going seven series and 10 overtimes in the seventh game, either, so there's pros and cons to both. Q. Your first championship year you mentioned you guys might have taken some people by surprise. Obviously the league has changed since then. How have you managed to sustain that success while teams are adapting? ANDREW BOGUT: Well, I think just the culture that's built here obviously helps when you can go and sign KD as a free agent and DeMarcus Cousins. So that happens because it's a destination club now. It's a club that people want to come and play for, whereas 10 years ago, it was -- if they called premier free agents, they probably wouldn't have got called back or they would have got laughed at, to be brutally honest. So sensational job of that. It's kind of remained relatively the same as far as what we do. We don't run anything special or any trick plays or anything like that. We run -- we do what we do best and we kind of live and die by that, and fortunately we've been living by it a whole lot more than dying. Q. KD has dealt with a steady stream of mean comments, (indiscernible). Just on a human level, what's it like dealing with that, just not being able to go on social media? ANDREW BOGUT: Yeah, obviously it's where we are as a society. It's easy to jump on your computer and your phone and just say things that you'd never say to somebody if you were face to face with them, and that's just the reality we're living in. We've got to find ways to deal with it. But yeah, I don't think it's right, but it's not going to stop. That's the beauty of social media is people can go on there and post their thoughts, but the bad side of it is you have a lot of idiots on there. Think about in high school how many people -- you had good people and bad people, and now you give those bad people a phone anonymously and they can type things, you get what you get. It's interesting, I kind of have a laugh with it. I comment on all kinds of things on social media and get all kinds of abuse, but I kind of laugh at it and try to make fun of people back. But obviously KD, it does bother him a little bit, and that's human nature, too. People criticize him for it bothering him. You know, he's a human being just like anybody else, and I think he has a right to put his comments forward, and he has a right to sign where he wants as a free agent. The whole point of free agency is the first word is "free," so if he wants to sign wherever he wants to sign, it's his decision. Q. How many burner accounts do you have? ANDREW BOGUT: None. My main account is like a burner account. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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