LOS ANGELES CLIPPERS MEDIA CONFERENCE

May 30, 2021

Rick Carlisle

Postgame Press Conference

(Mavericks interviews)

Clippers - 106, Mavericks - 81

COACH CARLISLE: As badly as it went, I saw a lot of positives in the game. I saw guys trying to do the right things. We had a very poor shooting night and had some good looks.

We've got to work at defending better. That's obvious. And that's where it's at. It's pretty simple. It's really a matchup-based series. And I just feel like we just gotta work to get more traction defensively. That's really the main focus for us.

Q. How did Luka look physically out there to you? I mean from us, from where we are, he was grimacing a lot and bent over sometimes?

COACH CARLISLE: Yes, he's in pain. It appeared to me that he couldn't turn left. Couldn't look to his left. He couldn't turn his neck to the left. And that's difficult for a guy that relies on peripheral vision and basically has played his whole life with his head on a swivel.

So we've got to hope in the next couple of days that he can get better -- hopefully substantially better. There's a two-day break between games, which is a positive in this case.

It's a positive for both teams if you've got guys beat up and banged up, which I'm sure both teams do have at some level. But his neck issue certainly contributed to a 9-for-24 night and him having some real unusual struggles.

Q. What are the biggest concerns that you have about the way you match up or the way they're attacking you when they're small and you guys are on the defensive end?

COACH CARLISLE: They've got two great players that are just putting their head down and basically trying to go through us. We'll look at the film. See what we can do better. And, look, the first two games we won were very high-scoring games. We scored a lot. One game they scored 121; the other they scored 103. Those were high-scoring games.

From a process standpoint we've just got to stick with it offensively. We had a lot of looks we liked. We've just got to keep stepping into them with force. And we've got to work with the defense. Leonard is a great player; George is a great player. They've got great shooting. It's a challenge.

Q. When you say you need to be better defensively, is it specifically just individual performances? Is there scheme issues that you already can pinpoint that need to be improved?

COACH CARLISLE: Yes, I think it's all of the above. When you look at -- let's see here, points in the paint, 44. That's a lot. We had 42. In the first game there was a huge differential there. And we made some of that up, which is good.

Second-chance points, we made a little bit of hay there. But a lot of this is transition. They had 17 transition points. We had four. In a playoff series where transition points is really one of the few ways you can get easy baskets, when you go minus-13 in that area, you know, you really put yourself up against it.

So, defense is always going to start with the quality of shot that you get. Look, when you're missing and then not doing a good job of getting back, it amplifies the challenges even more. So it's all connected.

But we've got to remain steadfast on the things that got us to a 2-2 situation in the series. And we've just got to keep working at our defense, our defensive rebounding, and keep stepping into shots.