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NBA FINALS: CAVALIERS v WARRIORS

June 16, 2016

Steve Kerr

Cleveland, Ohio: Game Six

Cleveland 115, Golden State 101

Q. Steve, do you think your team lost its composure, specifically Steph with throwing the mouthpiece and getting ejected?
STEVE KERR: Well, that had nothing to do with the outcome. The outcome was decided. But he had every right to be upset. He's the MVP of the league. He gets six fouls called on him, three of them were absolutely ridiculous. He steals the ball from Kyrie clean at one point. LeBron flops on the last one. Jason Phillips falls for that, for a flop. As the MVP of the league, we're talking about these touch fouls in the NBA Finals.

Let me be clear, we did not lose because of the officiating. They totally outplayed us and Cleveland deserved to win. But those three of the six fouls were incredibly inappropriate calls for anybody, much less the MVP of the league.

Q. So are you okay with him throwing his mouthpiece?
STEVE KERR: Yeah, I'm happy he threw his mouthpiece. He should be upset. Look, it's The Finals and everybody's competing out there. There are fouls on every play. It's a physical game. I just think that Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, the way we run our offense, we're running, we're cutting through the lane, we're a rhythm offense. If they're going to let Cleveland grab and hold these guys constantly on their cuts and then you're going to call these ticky-tack fouls on the MVP of the league to foul him out, I don't agree with that.

Q. Are you worried about your team's emotions at all going into Game 7?
STEVE KERR: Not at all. I think if you start out every season and you say we get a Game 7, we get one game at home to win the NBA Championship, I'll take it every time.

So I can't wait for Sunday. I think we'll be fine. Obviously Cleveland has played well the last two games, and we've got to play better. But I'm confident we will. We're in a spot that 29 other teams would love to be in.

Q. You played with Michael and other great players and you've coached the two-time MVP. But are there still times even as an opposing coach that competing against LeBron leaves you awestruck with some of the things he does?
STEVE KERR: He's a fantastic player, brilliant player. He's so athletic and strong, and tonight he was hitting his jump shot. He played a brilliant game.

Q. There was an incident in Miami a few years ago when I think it was Udonis threw a mouthpiece. I think it may have struck Joey Crawford. I think he got a game for it in the postseason. As ridiculous as it may sound, are you at all concerned that the league's going to do something to Steph going into Game 7?
STEVE KERR: No, I'm not concerned about that.

Q. You're confident, as you should be, that you can win Game 7, but you have lost two in a row now. Where does your confidence come from? Why do you think you'll prevail?
STEVE KERR: Our confidence comes from being the defending champions, from winning at an incredibly high rate the last two years. And let's be frank, we were put in a pretty difficult position in Game 5 without one of our best players, and we didn't respond well enough. We needed to play better in Game 5.

But we'll have Draymond for Game 7. We'll have our home crowd. We'll have everybody but Boges. We missed Boges tonight, but we still feel very confident that we can win without him.

Like I said, you get one home game to win the NBA title, that's not a bad deal.

Q. What was going on with Iguodala's back? What was your calculus in deciding to leave him out there when he was obviously a little hindered? And are you concerned about him at all for Sunday?
STEVE KERR: Well, his back tightened up. I continued to talk with the trainers throughout the game. I wanted to make sure it wasn't anything that was going to get worse. So his back was tight, but we tried to limit his minutes as much as we could.

He wanted to play, and this is probably the first time I'm happy that we have two days before a game in this series. So hopefully he'll get some treatment and be ready to roll for Game 7.

Q. What happened in the first quarter? How would you explain what happened and why you guys played so poorly?
STEVE KERR: Obviously Cleveland brought a lot of force to the game. I thought we had some good shots early that didn't go in, and it was like 6-0 after about four minutes. Our defense was pretty good. They had a couple run-outs where they got lay-ups, but our half-court defense was good. We just could not get a shot to fall, and then they just blitzed us.

As I said, they deserved to win the game. They outplayed us. It was too difficult to come back from 20 down. We made a good push in the second half, but that first quarter was a good punch from them.

Q. Can you talk about Harrison, sometimes his shot goes in, sometimes it doesn't. At this point are you concerned about his game? You clearly went away from him in the second half of this game. Where do you think he stands going into Game 7 just mentally and physically?
STEVE KERR: Well, he's had two tough games in a row. But this is the NBA Playoffs. This is what happens. It happens. It happened to me several times in the Playoffs when I was playing. You have a couple bad games, you think too much. You're struggling. The focus is brighter. The lights are brighter during the Playoffs, so everybody notices. The regular season you have a couple bad games and nobody cares.

But I'm really confident in Harrison. He's going to start on Sunday, and he's still one of our key guys, and I'm very confident that he'll come out and play well.

Q. Early in the series Klay and Steph were struggling and the other guys were kind of carrying them. Somebody had a big game, Shaun or Draymond, and now they're seemingly struggling. Shaun had a bad game. Draymond, I don't know how you would characterize his contribution today, and Harrison as was just mentioned. But so many other guys, how do you get them all playing well at the same time, enough of them, at least, to be representative of the team you've been this past year and these past two years, and what's going to be the key in Game 7?
STEVE KERR: I thought Draymond played well. He didn't score a lot of points, but I thought he played well. He really battled defensively. Ten boards, six assists. He only had one turnover. I thought he was really solid.

Shaun didn't shoot the ball well. Harrison struggled a little bit. But you go game to game and you can just pick. Look at the boxscore and pick it apart. Some guys play well, some guys don't. It's just the way it goes. It's part of playoff basketball. So we'll rally the troops. We'll get everybody ready for Game 7. As I said, a home game to win the NBA title, it's as good as it gets. So we're excited to be flying home and get our fans behind us and we'll be ready to roll.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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