LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 1, 2020

Lou Williams

Press Conference

Q. Lou, I'm just curious, you guys' families are supposed to join you soon with the second round coming up now. Have you had any family join you or seen anyone yet or planning to have anyone join you?

LOU WILLIAMS: Yeah, my family will be here after the end of the week.

Q. What do you think that will do for you in terms of the mental side of things, not being able to see your family for a while, being in this bubble for over a month now?

LOU WILLIAMS: Yeah, it'll just be good to be around some people that care about you, that you care about outside of your teammates. This environment can be a little mundane at times, so to have some fresh energy, to have some people in here that you can kind of bounce your energy off of, especially last time I left my son he was a little smaller. He's crawling around taking a few steps, got a few teeth now, so I'm excited to see him, excited to see his growth, as well as his mom, and just be around some love. So it's cool.

Q. I was wondering if you can take me back to last Wednesday with the players' meeting because the Clippers -- you had told me when you had reservations about coming down to Orlando to play, you guys voted as a team to all go down and play, and here you are with all the other players from all the other teams wondering if you should play. What was that Wednesday like? Doc also said you had a second meeting in the hallway to talk as players about what to do that night. What was that like?

LOU WILLIAMS: It's a lot, man. Everything that we're dealing with is overwhelming. We're inside of a controlled environment, outside of yesterday, without our families. We're expected to entertain you guys, save the world, speak up on issues that are very personal. That hits home for us. We're overwhelmed. So I think a lot of our opinions and a lot of our feelings reflected that last week, and we had another opportunity to speak again as a group and decided to make a decision and continue to use our platforms.

Nothing that we're dealing with is easy. You know, it's not play, put your career in jeopardy, put your futures on hold, how you make a livelihood. A lot of people are quick to say, why don't you guys just stop playing, just don't play and protest. Those same people are going to go to work the next day. Sometimes I just think we get caught up in the entertainment aspect of this business and people kind of forget that this is the way we feed our families and this is our livelihoods.

It was an overwhelming time. It was an overwhelming few days. I'm glad that we got some positive steps out of it to continue on to fight for social injustices to people of color, people in general who have dealt with police brutality. I was happy that out of everything outside of the pause that we were able to provoke some change, so I was proud in that aspect.

Q. Your point about the challenges and not being able to see family and spending all this time in the bubble, what sort of things do you try to do? How easy or more difficult has it been given the busyness of the schedule?

LOU WILLIAMS: It was difficult for me, and I took a different approach personally. I told my girlfriend to kind of relax on the pictures, relax on trying to talk to me as much because you start worrying and you get caught up in that. I just wanted to try to train my mindset to be focused on the moment, focused on the environment that I'm actually in, and now that we're about 72 hours out from me being able to personally see my family, I can kind of relax and be able to see them and welcome them with open arms and a warm heart.

Early in this process I wasn't sure when the next time I was going to be able to see them, so I just had to kind of use the mentality of block it out, so it was difficult.

Q. On that note, trying to stay in the moment, is it easier to kind of see the end of the tunnel, so to speak, when you realize even if you guys go to the Finals, you're more than halfway done? Does that matter? Do the stakes matter?

LOU WILLIAMS: None of this is easy, Bro. I'll just be candid with you. This is an extremely different environment. It's difficult. One of the best positives that we do have is the opportunity to compete every day. I've always used basketball as an outlet, as something that if I had something going on outside of the court, I've used basketball as an outlet for me to express myself and blow some steam off. That's one of the positives. Other than that, I take this a day at a time. I don't overwhelm myself with the road ahead, and that's the best way I can deal with it personally.

Q. You were asked about Wednesday night, what that was like. I'm curious about Thursday, the next day. It was reported that you were the one that some players reached out to to say, hey, are the Clippers in or are they out on Thursday morning. Did you talk to your players individually? Did you get together to decide that? What was that moment like?

LOU WILLIAMS: Yeah, we spoke collectively. Every decision we've made thus far as far as this bubble, before we got here, during and what we were going to do, we've always made those decisions collectively. You know, we spoke, we had one opinion, and we spoke again, we had a different opinion, and then from that process we began to weigh the pros and the cons. I think Wednesday night -- what's been reported as far as the decision that the Clippers made, it was never a decision. It was a poll being taken in the room, and what was supposed to happen was there was supposed to be a conversation made why this team feels like this and why this team felt like that. Unfortunately we didn't get that far. Emotions were running high, and then the reports came out that we were one of the teams to say no. So we never had an opportunity to really explain our position, because truth be told, we didn't really know our positions. Emotions were running high. It was a frustrating time. We felt like we should take a strong stance on things that were going out on side of the bubble in real life, and we just didn't really know how to express that at the time.

Thursday we let cooler heads prevail, and I feel like we made the decision that best fit us.

Q. I just wanted to talk to you about the last couple games you guys played with such a defensive sense of urgency. What was the mindset going into those last games, and did you kind of see your running mate Trez start to get back into the flow of playing with great energy and passion on the floor?

LOU WILLIAMS: I thought we were finding our groove going into the last half of the season before the quarantine began, before the outbreak and everything, and I thought these last few games we kind of figured out for us to be a successful basketball team the things that we need to do on the basketball floor, and we just got back to that. We got back to the basics of knowing what we need to do to win, and we bottled that up. I wasn't really concerned with scoring the basketball, I just wanted to be out on the floor, make sure I got my defensive job, get that down pat and focused on that, and anything else we felt like we'd be able to score the basketball based off of making the other team miss shots. We were focused on that, and it worked for us.