LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 13, 2020

Doc Rivers

Press Conference

Q. Yesterday you talked about Kamala Harris. She visited your team a few years back and left an impression it seemed like. I'm curious, when was that? What did she talk to your team about, and what were your takeaways about who she was after that meeting?

DOC RIVERS: Man, we talked about a lot of things. I would say that the gist of the Kamala Harris conversation with our team was more about education. K through three you learn to read, three through whatever else you read to learn, and how quickly you can fall behind. And we had a very deep conversation on where we could help.

And so she left a big imprint on that team. Chris Paul was on that team. So yeah, I've been a big fan ever since.

Q. When you have speakers like Ms. Harris come in and talk to the guys, do you see the results of that? Obviously with Chris Paul going forward --

DOC RIVERS: Yeah, I think it's our job, like to educate not only ourselves but our players. I don't even call them team builders, but I just think they're -- doing and teaching our guys things that they may not want to learn or may not want to get involved in can change -- this is me speaking as an individual, a coach, my thing is that they do all the work, the players, the young people. I think that's what makes this movement here so powerful. In a lot of ways, the players are leading, and for me, that's just really cool.

Q. When you first got to the bubble you said you talked to a coach who said, hey, in this bubble there are going to be either teams that become really close or they're going to hate each other. What have you seen from your players and how they've gotten closer and how that might translate playoff time? And the second thing, you've really hammered home the thing about voting. With all this chatter about people possibly tampering with the postal service, do you have any solution about how to go about voting if something happens in that area?

DOC RIVERS: Well, I'm going to be short on the first question, and that's I think it's helped everyone. Every team has grown being in this bubble. When you're together this long -- I was talking to Jerry West this morning about that. He was like, it's not like you have an off button. When you're doing the regular season, when you go home, you go home. You get away from it. You spend time with your family and your kids or whatever. You get away from it. You don't get away from it here. You're with it every day. You're at work every moment. And so in a lot of ways it exposes a lot of things about each other. I think in the long run, it's been very good for us.

As far as the voting thing, it's clear we -- it's funny how -- it's amazing, I've been sending mail out all my life and it's never been a problem, and now all of a sudden it's a problem. You know, voter suppression is happening, right, so on one end we have voter suppression, which has been happening -- this is not new. Voter suppression has been happening my entire life, and it's been done by the same people to the same people.

Now you add the youth in because it used to just be the black and brown, and now it's black, brown and young. So on one end we have voter suppression, and then on the other end we all of a sudden have this mail problem, which has never been a problem.

You know there's four states that do mail-in-only voting and they've done it for years and they've had no problems.

It's something that someone, and I'm just going to say it that way, wants us to believe that's not there.