LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS MEDIA CONFERENCE

July 18, 2020

Paul George

Press Conference

Q. Just take us through your day-to-day now that you've been there a week. Do you have a routine set? And also, what's your level of concern now that there's preseason games coming up, you guys are about a week away from the regular-season games and you guys are still missing three to four pieces?

PAUL GEORGE: As far as my routine, I just try to stick with just mapping out my time from downtime to time to call my family, my girl, my kids, my parents, and then extracurricular stuff, fishing, the amenities that they're providing here. I'm not really strict on like doing this at this part of the hour, but I just try to do stuff to keep me busy.

In terms of the guys, missing a couple of guys, you know, I think we've got a veteran group, and we've got guys that know what our mission is. You know, we've been down and missed guys pretty much all season long, so we've been filling it in. We've been holding it down until everybody has been available, and we plan on continuing to do so.

Q. I'm just wondering how has the team's conditioning been, and where do you guys feel like you are? How far you are away from getting back to where you were before the season stopped?

PAUL GEORGE: After taking three, four months off, it's going to be a process to get our conditioning back to what it was, but I think where we're at now, we're pretty good.

Sorry, what was the second part of that question?

Q. You guys have played really well before the season stopped; how do you think you guys will get back to that? How long will it take? Is it impossible to really tell?

PAUL GEORGE: No, I don't think it'll take long. Again, we're a group that know why we're here, what we're competing for. I think for us it's just putting us in that environment, putting us out there, and we're going to get the job done. Again, this is a pretty focused group, and we're prepared for everything.

Q. To kind of follow up a little bit, when the shutdown happened, you guys were looking like the team I think that everybody thought you were going to look like. You can't control it, obviously, the pandemic happened, but how frustrating was that that it looked like you guys were really starting to become who you looked like you were going to be in July when you and Kawhi ended up there? How frustrating was that?

PAUL GEORGE: It was a little frustrating because we played our way all the way up until that point, we played ourselves into that chemistry, into that zone we were in. We were getting guys healthy. You know, that was really the team coming together. We added Reggie, we added Marcus, and we were starting to mold and shape and learn each other. It was tough to take this little break.

But I think ultimately it's going to pay off. Again, we had so many guys dealing with little nicks and bruises, and we were one of the teams that could have benefitted off of the healing process and coming together healthy.

This break did wonders for this group, and we're going to pick up where we left off at.

Q. You talked about how the break helped this team basically get your health back. I was wondering when everybody was apart for four months, everybody in the NBA, how did the Clippers use it to kind of keep the chemistry going? What did you learn about your players, your teammates, that you think this will kind you help you guys when you guys restart in this unprecedented restart that the NBA is having? How did the chat help you guys?

PAUL GEORGE: Well, I mean, we talked to each other every day. We motivated each other. We pushed each other. I mean, guys was in the chat videoing ourselves, videoing each other working out. We were making sure we were staying in shape so guys was videoing them doing suicides, doing conditioning drills. We just stayed locked in, and I almost thought that we grew even stronger being further away from each other, because again, we knew what was at stake this year, and we knew what we had, and we didn't want to lose that.

I thought we did an amazing job of just staying together, staying as a group, and again, continuing to push each other to get better.