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NBA FINALS: CAVALIERS v WARRIORSJune 16, 2015David BlattCLEVELAND, OHIO: Game Six Golden State – 105 COACH BLATT: Would you mind if I started with something? Excuse me. First of all, I would like to congratulate Steve Kerr and his staff for the outstanding job they did this season. I want to congratulate the Golden State Warriors, their players, and their organization. They had a fabulous season. They handled themselves with class. They played great basketball. And they won the NBA Championship, and certainly they're a deserving group. I also want to thank my staff for all the great work that they did this season. It would be hard for me to be sitting here if it weren't for the group of guys that I work with. I want to thank the players of the Cavaliers team that gave so much and never quit, never made excuses, never gave up, and gave the best possible season that they could. This is a process. You don't wake up one morning and fall out of bed and expect to win the NBA Championship. You hope that you can, but it doesn't always work that way, and our guys did more than anyone could expect to put themselves and put our organization in this situation. I want to thank the Cavs organization for everything that they did to give us the opportunity to be as competitive as we've been and to be as successful as we've been. They held back on nothing in order to give us all of the chances to be the best team that we could be. And I thought our group answered that by carrying themselves in a great way, playing great basketball, and representing the Cavaliers, the city of Cleveland, northeast Ohio in the best possible way. I'm proud of everybody in our organization today. It's tough, tough to lose. It's tougher to be over. Not every story has a happy ending. It doesn't mean it's a bad story. This was not. This was a good story. And I'm appreciative to everyone that was part of this. Q. You were so shorthanded in this series against such a deep team. Can you just talk a little bit about how that depth probably did you guys in in four quarters and throughout the entire series, and how tough it was not having Kyrie and Kevin Love? COACH BLATT: Well, I mean, obviously we would have loved to have come into the series as a whole team. I feel badly for Kevin and for Kyrie because they did so much during the course of the season to help us get here. We're not here without either one of those guys, and obviously having had them in this series would have been‑‑ it would have been significant. But we never asked for sympathy when they went down. We never made an excuse, and I certainly won't do that now. We played our hearts out. The Warriors were better. Those guys will get healthy, and we'll come back after it next season. Q. When you were first hired, not many people in the world thought that LeBron James would come back to the Cavs, and then all of a sudden he's dropped into your lap. Can you tell us a little bit what this year's been like coaching him? And now that you're going to have a full off‑season with him, what do you think about the future now that you've had this year of experience with him? COACH BLATT: Well, I think that what's evident to everyone is what a spectacular basketball player that LeBron is. But he has become a great leader of his team. He's become a guy that has evolved in terms of his role within the team and within the whole concept of what it is that we want to be about. It was a challenging but oh so rewarding and beneficial chance that I was given to work with the best player in the world, and he competed for us. He led the team, and he made every attempt to make this work. And I give him a lot of credit for that. It would have been easy to do otherwise, but he did not. He was a great, great‑‑ he was of great assistance to me in many, many ways. And it's an honor to coach him. He should be proud of what he did this year. I thought he had one of the best seasons of his career, and I'm glad that I could be one of the guys that helped him do that. Q. You overcame a lot of challenges in the past in Europe and Israel specifically. Was it the most difficult season you had as a basketball coach? And second thing, if I may, you talked a lot about a process. I know it's 30 minutes after the end of the season, but what are your expectations from you and from this team for the future? COACH BLATT: Yeah, every season has its own set of challenges and its own life. It's very hard to compare one season with the next. I will say this, I was challenged to make the adjustment to a different kind of game, almost to a different world, the world of the NBA, which is unlike any other situation that I've been involved in. I got great help from my assistants, from the players that I coached, certainly from the management that I worked with. And, sure, it was tough. It was like stepping into a new world and having to learn and make your way every single day. But I was blessed with a lot of great players and a lot of opportunity to find my way. And we were in the NBA Finals, two games away from winning it. I think we did pretty well. Q. When the Warriors‑‑ now that you're out of it, when the Warriors went small with Iguodala in Game 4, how difficult or how challenging was that for you and your coaching staff to kind of weigh the pros and cons whether to stay big or to match small? What was that process like for you guys? COACH BLATT: Certainly that was a critical and determining factor in this series. There is no way around it. I do think, on the other hand, that a lot of what happened to us can be attributed to even more basic things. We shot the heck out of the three‑point shot this year. I don't know what our percentage‑‑ I haven't looked yet‑‑ was from three for the series, but I think it was very, very low. We never seemed to play the kind of game, after Game 3, that we had to make us successful in the first three games. We sort of lost the pace battle and the game speeded up to a point where I thought it affected us adversely. And certainly part of that is the smaller lineup. As was mentioned before, their depth over time did have its impact. In another situation, that may not have been the case, but that was the situation here. So I really think those were the determining factors. Q. Coach, I know you went to hack‑a‑Iggy late in the game. Did you ever think about going earlier in the ballgame knowing that when Iggy comes off the floor, now you're not the main defender on LeBron James? COACH BLATT: Earlier in the game we were pretty much in it. We seemed to be doing well. You know, I hate that tactic, Dennis, I really do. And I'm waiting for the NBA to do something about it this summer. Not because I or someone else doesn't want to use it. I just think it's the right thing for the game. And I offer my assistance if they want to hear my ideas, but that's not for now. But we did use it in the last game, obviously, to some benefit. It just didn't seem to come about this game later in the game like it did where we could have done it earlier, but we were playing better and we were doing okay. That's the best I can do for you on that. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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