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NBA EASTERN CONFERENCE FINALS: CAVALIERS v HAWKSMay 24, 2015David BlattCLEVELAND, OHIO: Game Three Atlanta Hawks - 111 Q.  After the last game, you said you were running out of superlatives to describe LeBron. How would you describe tonight's game? COACH BLATT: Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. I have never seen a stat line like that in a playoff game, or in any other game, to be honest with you. Excuse me. It's not just the stat line. It's a lot more than that, you know. LeBron cramped up, and he knew that we could not win the game without him, and he played through pain, and he played through the cramping, and he just wouldn't let us lose. Just would not let us lose. Amazing. Q. I was going to ask what LeBron's injuries were. It looked like they were working on his knee throughout the game. I saw in overtime, like four minutes left, he had motioned to you to come out, and then he stayed back in. Were you looking‑‑ COACH BLATT: It was tough for him to convince me to keep him on the floor. It really was. I sort of said, okay. Q. Can you tell us at any length what it is that he's battling injury‑wise? COACH BLATT: I don't know. I do know he smiled in the locker room, and that's a good sign. Q. So many ebbs and flows, twists and turns in this game. The slow start, LeBron started 0‑for‑10 and the numbers‑‑ COACH BLATT: Can you imagine if he started quickly, what we would have seen out here tonight? Holy smokes. Or he was setting us up for it, I don't know. Q. Could be like Kyrie earlier this year, right? COACH BLATT: Right. Q. As far as turning it around, what do you think got him going, and what do you think turned it around for you guys tonight? COACH BLATT: We didn't stopped playing‑‑ honestly, in the first quarter, we just couldn't get the ball to go down. We had a lot of shots on the rim. We didn't turn it over a whole lot. We weren't making a whole lot of mistakes. Just couldn't make shots. We stayed with it. We kept playing the way we wanted to play. I thought Atlanta put up a great fight tonight. I give them credit for what they did on the floor and how they competed. Even more credit to our guys, the way they hung in and just refused to lose. Q. David, did you get an explanation on the technical foul when Dellavedova was involved in the mixup with Horford there? COACH BLATT: I didn't get a real specific explanation, to be honest with you. I would be interested to hear about it or read about it or whatever. Q. Tristan Thompson picked up his fifth foul about halfway through the fourth quarter. You took him out briefly, put him back in, and played him the rest of the game. Can you explain how you had the confidence to do that, you're with him playing with five fouls. COACH BLATT: Well, Tristan is a good defender, and he played the game right, and we needed him on the floor. We needed another rebounder, and we needed his defensive capability. The game could have got away from us there. I had to make a decision. I had to take a risk, and hoped that he could play foul‑free. I didn't expect that he'd have to play foul‑free for five more minutes in the overtime, which he did, to his credit, and he had a lot to do with us winning that game. Q. With Kyrie, the decision before the game not to play him, can you just give us the thought process on that? And closeout game, Game No. 4, looking forward to that, is he going to be available, or will that be a game‑time decision as well? COACH BLATT: In consultation with the doctors and by the doctors' decision, we decided to hold him out. I really don't know about 48 hours from now. That will be, again, most likely a game‑time decision. We're just hoping for him to get well and hoping we can get him back as soon as possible. If I may say, the other guys are stepping up, and the other guys are giving everything they have to make up for Kev not playing, for Kyrie not playing, with no excuses and no quit. They're just hanging in there and doing everything they can to help the Cavs win. That's great to see. That's what a team does. Q. The rotation down to only seven guys, really, I mean, Shawn just played a couple of minutes, and heavy minutes at that, way up in the 40s like it was tonight because of the overtime. Can you see Kyrie, notwithstanding an increased rotation, come Tuesday or is it just gut‑it‑out time, and these are the guys you've got to go with. COACH BLATT: I missed the part about Kyrie. Q. I'm saying Kyrie notwithstanding, taking him out of the mix because whether or not he comes back on Tuesday. Would other guys increase the rotation beyond what you have, or do you think these are the seven, eight guys we can go to war with plus Kyrie? COACH BLATT: First of all, we can go to war with everybody, but we played the game to win it, and I rotated the players as I saw fit for us to win it. If that's what it takes, that's what we'll do. If it means we've got to do something else or I've got to do something else, I'll do that, too, because everybody's got to be ready to play and everybody's got to be ready to step in. We are having our difficulties in terms of missing guys and missing minutes, and we're just trying to figure out how to play it. Fortunately, TV time‑outs are long, and the number of time‑outs are great. We're figuring out how to get a little extra rest here and there for guys, and guys are responding well. Q. Coach, you're talking about mixing and matching. One of the things it seemed like is that you had some other people bringing the ball up other than Delly and LeBron at times. Could you speak to that. And also, J.R.'s incredible rebounding during this game. COACH BLATT: I thought we did offensively pretty much what we wanted to do, and we did share the ball‑handling duties some partly because of what we wanted to run on offense and partly just to avoid fatigue or overfatigue. J.R. Smith played a great game. He defended his position, and he made a couple of huge, huge shots. Ten rebounds for a two guard, that's pretty impressive, and it just seemed like every one of them was important, really important, and he was engaged, and he stuck his nose in there to help us out in the gray areas of the game and did, once again, just a great job. J.R. has been great since day one, as I've told you, and he's consistent. He keeps giving it to us. Q. What are you learning about this team as it goes through the playoffs with the different things happening? COACH BLATT: It makes me think of John Wayne's True Grit, to be honest with you. The guys are gritty. They're not going to give in to anything. That's to our credit, to our players' credit. Cavaliers have got a lot of heartful guys, and that's a good thing. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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