LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 29, 2020

Landry Shamet

Press Conference

Q. After the events leading up to Wednesday night's meetings and some of the meetings on Thursday, what was your level of optimism or pessimism that you guys were going to walk away from Orlando and there was going to be no season?

LANDRY SHAMET: I mean, for me, just how quickly moving everything was, from when Milwaukee decided to do what they did and kind of seeing the domino effect after that of kind of how things played out, there was -- for a second, you're obviously thinking about that, like this could get shut down pretty quick. Seeing other leagues doing it, kind of knowing the impact that we had on really the world, you know, for those like 48 hours. It was definitely real, something that crossed my mind for sure.

Obviously I wanted to make sure I was prepared for either situation, but ultimately I think there's a lot of guys here that, one, love basketball, and two, realize that without this kind of platform, you guys aren't asking me these question in this setting and I'm not able to express my opinion on a variety of things. I think that's big. Ultimately I felt like we were going to be okay.

Q. Considering all that's been invested in going after a championship with this team this year, what did that tell you about what the team wanted when they voted, hey, we don't know if this is right to continue?

LANDRY SHAMET: Well, with that, it wasn't -- one thing that I think is getting lost in all this, this isn't about wanting to play basketball. We want to play basketball. We're professional basketball players. This is what we love to do. It's what we want to do. It's a matter of with everything going on in the world socially, racially, it was a matter of like we don't know what the right thing to do is. It could go a variety of different ways and do pros and cons of each, and that was just a vote on our team of what certain guys wanted to play and certain guys didn't, thinking that that could ultimately make the best social impact. It's not a question of do we want to win a championship, because we do. That's all we think about. We're back locked in. We're here. That's our one goal. So that's not the question at all. That hasn't changed. That won't change, as long as this group is together.

Q. You sort of talked about being locked in. Is it challenging to sort of compartmentalize a little bit all the big issues about just you guys and basketball? And then also, was there a benefit to just kind of having a couple days off to breathe, as Doc said?

LANDRY SHAMET: Yeah, no, for sure. I think that's one thing that -- we hadn't really had time to, one, collectively as all the players come together and really like get to address some of the issues that we did, just be able to talk and have some good conversation. And then personally like me just being able to sit in my room and kind of just cope and reflect on everything that's happened.

I mean, it was therapeutic to a sense. It was hard. It's been weird and painful, but I think it's important, like you said, just to be able to cope with certain things, just to have that step away for a split second.

Q. Paul George said that he had a lot of people coming up to him saying that they appreciated him coming out talking about the psychological side of things.

LANDRY SHAMET: Well, first off, if you can have the courage to come out and speak about what's going on in your head and mentally, psychologically, I don't care who you are, if you're Paul George or you're a regular person on the street, like that's empowering and should be taken that way from anybody who was able to see it and hear it. So obviously first off, I'm proud of him for being able to be open about that.

And secondly, I think obviously like I just said, it's Paul George doing that, saying that, then it shows the reality of regardless of who you are, we all have our things that we have to deal with and cope with and can visit those dark places sometimes. It should be eye-opening and received well by anybody who heard it.